The Place of the Social Margins, 1350-1750 1138790729, 9781138790728, 0367264021, 9780367264024, 9781315756462

This interdisciplinary volume illuminates the shadowy history of the disadvantaged, sick and those who did not conform t

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The Place of the Social Margins, 1350-1750
 1138790729, 9781138790728, 0367264021, 9780367264024, 9781315756462

Table of contents :
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgments ix
1. Introduction / JANE L. STEVENS CRAWSHAW 1
PART I. Health 19
2. Marginal Bodies and Minds: Responses to Leprosy and Mental Disorders in Late Medieval Normandy / ELMA BRENNER 21
3. 'Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour': Disability and ‘Marginality’ in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England / DAVID M. TURNER 39
PART II. The Law 57
4. Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice / SARA M. BUTLER 59
5. Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration: William Herbert’s Considerations in the Behalf of Foreiners (1662) / ANDREW SPICER 79
PART III. Work 101
6. Down but Not Out: A Case Study in Early Modern Social Mobility From the Margins / JOEL F. HARRINGTON 103
7. The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain / CARMEN FRACCHIA 117
8. The Margins in the Centre: Working Around Rialto in Sixteenth-Century Venice / ROSA M. SALZBERG 135
PART IV. Morality and the Home 153
9 Cleaning up the Renaissance City: The Symbolic and Physical Place of the Genoese Brothel in Urban Society / JANE L. STEVENS CRAWSHAW 155
10. Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault: Compromised Chastity, Marginalized Lives? / SARAH TOULALAN 181
11. Afterword: Constructing Marginality in the Early Modern European City / FABRIZIO NEVOLA 203
Contributors 211
Index 213

Citation preview

The Place of the Social Margins, 1350–1750

This interdisciplinary volume illuminates the shadowy history of the disadvantaged, sick and those who did not conform to the accepted norms of society. It explores how marginal identity was formed, perceived and represented in Britain and Europe during the medieval and early modern periods. It illustrates that the identities of marginal groups were shaped by their place within primarily urban communities, both in terms of their socioeconomic status and the spaces in which they lived and worked. Some of these groups—such as executioners, prostitutes, pedlars and slaves— performed a significant social and economic function but on the basis of this were stigmatized by other townspeople. Language was used to control and limit the activities of others within society such as single women and foreigners, as well as the victims of sexual crimes. For many, such as lepers and the disabled, marginal status could be ambiguous, cyclical or short-lived and affected by key religious, political and economic events. Traditional histories have often considered these groups in isolation. Based on new research, a series of case studies from Britain and across Europe illustrate and provide important insights into the problems faced by these marginal groups and the ways in which medieval and early modern communities were shaped and developed. Andrew Spicer is Professor of Early Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University and a Literary Director of the Royal Historical Society. Jane Stevens Crawshaw is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in History at Oxford Brookes University.

Routledge Studies in Cultural History For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

40 The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century Contesting/Contested Memories Edited by David M. Seymour and Mercedes Camino 41 Jesuits at the Margins Missions and Missionaries in the Marianas (1668–1769) Alexandre Coello de la Rosa 42 Travelling Notions of Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe Edited by Hannu Salmi, Asko Nivala and Jukka Sarjala 43 Language as a Scientific Tool Shaping Scientific Language Across Time and National Tradition Edited by Miles MacLeod, Rocío G. Sumillera, Jan Surman and Ekaterina Smirnova 44 Transnational South America Experiences, Ideas, and Identities, 1860s–1900s Ori Preuss 45 Enlightenment and Political Fiction The Everyday Intellectual Cecilia Miller 46 Madness in Cold War America Alexander Dunst 47 Minor Knowledge and Microhistory Manuscript Culture in the Nineteenth Century Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and Davíð Ólafsson 48 The Place of the Social Margins, 1350–1750 Edited by Andrew Spicer and Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw

The Place of the Social Margins, 1350–1750 Edited by Andrew Spicer and Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-79072-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75646-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figuresvii Acknowledgmentsix  1 Introduction

1

JANE L. STEVENS CRAWSHAW

PART I

Health

19

  2 Marginal Bodies and Minds: Responses to Leprosy and Mental Disorders in Late Medieval Normandy

21

ELMA BRENNER

  3 ‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’: Disability and ‘Marginality’ in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England

39

DAVID M. TURNER

PART II

The Law

57

  4 Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice

59

SARA M. BUTLER

  5 Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration: William Herbert’s Considerations in the Behalf of Foreiners (1662) ANDREW SPICER

79

vi Contents PART III

Work

101

  6 Down but Not Out: A Case Study in Early Modern Social Mobility From the Margins

103

JOEL F. HARRINGTON

  7 The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain

117

CARMEN FRACCHIA

  8 The Margins in the Centre: Working Around Rialto in Sixteenth-Century Venice

135

ROSA M. SALZBERG

PART IV

Morality and the Home

153

  9 Cleaning up the Renaissance City: The Symbolic and Physical Place of the Genoese Brothel in Urban Society

155

JANE L. STEVENS CRAWSHAW

10 Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault: Compromised Chastity, Marginalized Lives?

181

SARAH TOULALAN

11 Afterword: Constructing Marginality in the Early Modern European City

203

FABRIZIO NEVOLA

Contributors211 Index213

Figures

1.1 Vittore Carpaccio, Due Dame Veneziane © Museo Correr, Venice (inv. Cl. L n.0046) 1.2 Vittore Carpaccio (Italian, about 1460–1526) Hunting on the Lagoon (recto); Letter Rack (verso), about 1490– 1495, Oil on panel 75.6 × 63.8 cm (29 3/4 × 25 1/8 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. 7.1 Diego Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, 1650. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Fletcher and Rogers Funds, and Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Grot (1876–1967), by exchange, supplemented by gifts from friends of the Museum, 1971 (1971.86). 7.2 Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. Artist: Diego Velázquez. Spanish, 17th century, c.1617–1618. Oil on canvas. Unframed: 55 × 118 cm. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland. 7.3 Juan de Pareja, The Calling of St Matthew, 1661, © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

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118

125 128

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Acknowledgments

This volume developed out of a conference held at St Anne’s College, Oxford on 23 and 24 March 2012, which was entitled ‘On the Margins? Rethinking the Problem and Place of ‘Outsiders’, 1400–1800’. This event was generously funded by the British Academy as part of a Small Grant awarded to Jane Stevens Crawshaw for her project ‘Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy: Environment, Space and the Social Margins’. In developing this book, it has been a pleasure to work with Max Novick and his team at Routledge and we are grateful to him for his support. Andrew Spicer and Jane Stevens Crawshaw Oxford, May 2015

Figure 1.1 Vittore Carpaccio, Due Dame Veneziane © Museo Correr, Venice (inv. Cl. L n.0046)

1 Introduction Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw

Vittore Carpaccio’s painting of Two women on a terrace was traditionally thought to portray Venetian courtesans, who were so much talked about by visitors to this important, early modern city (Figure 1.1). These were women who challenged the social boundaries of their society. Normally citizenborn, they interacted at close quarters with the powerful and were able to amass considerable wealth and independent reputations through their perceived immoral work. Research by the J. Paul Getty Museum undertaken a decade ago, however, illustrated that many scholars had misinterpreted this image because they had only a partial view of the whole. A lesser-known section dedicated to male leisure pursuits (detached during the nineteenth century for financial reasons) shows a bird hunt in the Venetian lagoon (Figure 1.2). The two panels formed a door or window shutter, designed to connect someone inside a home with a view of elite women on a balcony and elite men in the landscape beyond.1 Evocative for a number of reasons, the reinterpretation of this painting illustrates the ease with which social centres and margins can be confused; taken together, the two halves of the panel emphasize that place, or context, retains a vital role in clarifying the status of individuals in the past. Marginal groups were not defined quantitatively; instead they were identified by their perceived disadvantage of danger – of a physical, legal, political, religious, economic or social kind – which required a specific conceptual or physical space within society. Social ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (and spatial ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’) were not, however, constructed once at the level of society to remain thereafter fixed.2 This collection of essays, therefore, draws attention to the dynamic processes by which marginality was constructed and its often ambiguous, cyclical or temporary nature.3 The chapters develop the themes of language and space through nine case studies from England, France, Germany, Spain and the Italian peninsula. Within societies past and present there was an enormous discrepancy between design and outcome’.4 This volume suggests that once societal and urban ideals have been recognized, an understanding of the people and places of the margins is best served by a series of case studies, out of which, ‘family resemblances’ (to use Anton Blok’s term), can be identified.5 In depictions of space and society, a common palate of tones was utilized in differing styles

2  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw

Figure 1.2 Vittore Carpaccio (Italian, about 1460–1526) Hunting on the Lagoon (recto); Letter Rack (verso), about 1490–1495, Oil on panel 75.6 × 63.8 cm (29 3/4 × 25 1/8 in.). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

and traditions to produce distinct but related images of marginality. Focussing upon these ideas can help the historian to find a middle ground between approaches which view the social margins as a single, undifferentiated group or separate, unconnected ones.6 A similar balance can be struck between discussions of space in terms of oversimplified zones or simply characterised by diversity.7 This volume is structured in four sections, each of which represents a potential point of resemblance: health, the law, occupation and morality. Many of the essays speak to more than one of these themes and the boundaries between the sections are intended to permeable. In adopting this approach, it is important to remember that marginal groups were not synonymous with the idea of the ‘other’. This concept was culturally powerful and undoubtedly influenced episodes such as the ‘witch craze’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.8 Those identified as ‘the other’ in medieval and early modern Europe tended to be expelled from

Introduction  3 society, whether through banishment or death, although as Debra Kaplan has illustrated for Jews in sixteenth-century Germany, some groups were able to travel in from the countryside on a daily basis in order to support economic exchange.9 The groups considered in this volume, however, retained a place within their communities: there was perceived benefit to be gleaned from interaction (whether economic, religious, or social), such as in the case of Muslim traders, when contact facilitated potential economic exchange and religious conversion. Lance Lazar has illustrated that early Jesuit confraternities in 1540s Rome were established for reformed prostitutes, daughters of prostitutes and newly converted Jews and Muslims. He has claimed that these confraternities illustrated ‘a central feature of Jesuit confraternal activity: the purposeful, selective application of resources to produce the greatest calculated effect—specifically the reform of the most public sinners on the margins . . . The most important shared element [was] the emphasis on bringing marginalized groups to center stage’.10 When dealing with deviant groups too, it was thought to be essential that the responses to these groups were prominent, to communicate that any perceived threat was being managed by the community.11 In the case of society’s vulnerable groups, the policies employed could illustrate the charitable nature of state or Church in caring for those whose place within society was contested. The visibility of the problems posed by the margins and society’s solutions, therefore, is a key theme of this volume. The focus on the experience of social groups is not intended to overplay the coherence of these collective entities. As David Turner’s essay in this volume reminds us, it can be dangerous to overemphasise the group identity of marginal individuals and neglect to recognize that the keenest social isolation was likely to have been produced by a lack of group affiliation. In addition, there was often conflict to be found within these communities. This does not undermine their collective status. David Sabean has insightfully observed that, ‘What is common in community is not shared values or common understanding so much as the fact that members of a community are engaged in the same argument, in which alternative strategies, misunderstandings, conflicting goals and values are threshed out’.12 The thread which linked the identity of the individuals invariably shaped their treatment by others even if, as Shannon McSheffrey has illustrated in her work on stranger artisans in London, the difference between those within and without these groups was often ‘of degrees not kinds’.13 In this volume, the essays engage with the presentations and representations of the social margins using a variety of source material. Some sources were crafted by individuals, such as the petitions and tracts studied by Joel Harrington and Andrew Spicer and the self-portrait of the manumitted artist Juan de Pareja in Carmen Fracchia’s chapter. These essays explore the intention and effect of these forms of self-presentation. Often such sources were developed as a result of key religious, political and economic events of the period, including processes of state building and the Restoration, the Reformation and Catholic Reformation, and the Industrial Revolution.

4  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw The impact of this broader context is also evident in the remaining essays, which make use of representations which were produced by those beyond the margins. The account of rural life employed by David Turner is a series of observations and descriptions of an English community before the Industrial Revolution, including its disabled members. Legal sources, analysed in chapters by Sara Butler, Rosa Salzberg, and Sarah Toulalan, focussed upon specific groups, such as in court records which attempted to define medieval English singlewomen or the trial records of a pedlar branded as a heretic by the Venetian Inquisition and those accused of the rape of children in early modern England. Finally, institutional and government archives are used in the chapters by Elma Brenner and Jane Stevens Crawshaw which record the initiatives enacted in medieval French leper hospitals and the Renaissance Genoese brothel, respectively. In each case, marginal groups are shown to have been symbolically, socially, or spatially significant.

I  Centre and Periphery Studies of identity have illustrated that it was (and is) comprised of multiple, interwoven threads and, consequently, an individual would have belonged to different communities simultaneously.14 This perspective has rarely been extended to those considered to be on the margins, not least because of the tendency to consider the topic through the lens of poverty.15 There is no doubt that many of the groups considered as marginal could also be poor, but this was not always the case.16 The early modern period was one in which the authorities sought to categorize the poor as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’, as well as to clarify official responses in the form of institutional support. The poor were increasingly defined at the level of the state (even if they were identified and ministered to in practice at the level of the parish). The treatment of marginal groups might be combined with measures to deal with poverty, such as in the case of English legislation on Gypsies and vagrancy, but that does not mean that the original issues should be conflated. One effect of aligning marginality and poverty too closely has been that the role of the state in defining the margins has been overemphasized, with the effect that the perception of these groups has been simplified. Mary Elizabeth Perry characterized the relationship between the underworld and political authority as one of paradoxical antagonism and partnership; she urged historians not to confuse such an underworld with the poor, or to view it as a single class, but as a subculture.17 Social boundaries were not necessarily a ‘top down’ initiative and were often contested by many of the groups considered to be marginal to society in the past. Indeed, as an astute essay by Mary Laven has illustrated, groups could also perceive themselves to be marginal; in her research it was Venetian nuns, who were often noble, wealthy women, who considered themselves to have been excluded economically, socially and then architecturally as a result of Tridentine enclosure.18 Furthermore, Joel Harrington, in his essay in this volume, points out that

Introduction  5 historians tend to overplay formal exclusion, associated with state authority, but to undervalue the informal exclusion within communities, which is so much more difficult to trace. Sharon Strocchia has noted that, ‘Community isn’t something that just happens, it has to be continually reaffirmed, in some cases revivified . . .’19. This reaffirmation could take different forms, in which the social margins were often involved. Research in the fields of ritual and charity has established that these were expressions of collective definition from which marginal groups were not excluded.20 Communities could be enlivened by networks of information; in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, the brothel was a site of news and socialization, a space within which letters and messages were passed on to wives and sweethearts.21 Networks of knowledge could also be important; evidence from the Inquisition in Ferrara has portrayed brothels as sites to which respectable women ventured in order to obtain love potions and executioners could be authorities for medical care.22 Finally, networks of socialization were significant, including communal associations, such as guilds and confraternities. Although marginal groups were sometimes excluded from such organizations, there are also examples of specific associations such as the Spanish black confraternities considered in Carmen Fracchia’s chapter, which would have created a bounded sense of belonging. Existing studies have often located the margins at urban and societal boundaries and associated the groups with points of contestation and liminality.23 Research into the spaces of marginal groups, however, does ‘not support the notion . . . that there was a negative social gradient from a town’s center to the periphery’.24 Indeed, cities did not have single centres and peripheries in the past, despite the efforts of emerging states.25 Zones developed with particular social and economic characteristics and these could be the result of deliberate government policies, but Shannon McSheffrey’s work on the sanctuary and liberty of St Martin-le-Grand in London has illustrated that medieval and early modern cities could include multiple jurisdictions within their walls. These boundaries might be ill-defined. Such jurisdictional differences could also cause tensions; for example, London’s Southwark district accommodated the infamous theatre, bear-baiting and ‘stews’, but was located in the diocese of Winchester.26 Traditional studies which highlighted the use of space in response to the poor and sick, Jews, prostitutes and foreigners often portrayed these designated spaces as fixed, closed, and restrictive. Important revisionist work, such as that on medieval leprosy, has illustrated the extent to which these sites could remain important and visible parts of their broader communities.27 Networks of charity might connect inhabitants with those outside. From the sixteenth century, the ghettos and sites for foreign merchants were often central within cities with the intention of facilitating economic contact.28 With reference to the intramural brothels of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Ghirardo has described these locations as ones of ‘ambiguous centrality’.29 The official demarcation of such spaces tended to

6  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw create sites which were symbolically separate but which could be situated in a variety of locations. As this volume illustrates, the location of marginal groups could be much more central than has been assumed. The significance of official, spatial responses to marginal groups has prompted many historians to develop the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s ideas regarding dirt as ‘matter out of place’. Her thesis has long been influential in emphasizing the significance of context for shaping perspectives on what would be considered clean or dirty, safe or secure. A number of historians have extended the implications of her study and connected her work with events such as the alarming nature of bells ringing at unauthorized time, soldiers raising arms or children ‘howling, singing and screaming’ outside the home.30 For groups whose position within society was ambiguous there is no doubt that the local setting shaped the form and timing of policies, as demonstrated by extant studies on communities of Jews and their varying experiences.31 A volume on Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe has shown that, despite a stable legal framework in many countries, there were frequently changing social relations with Jews, Greeks, Lombards, Venetians, Castilians, and Hanseatics in European cities ranging from Antwerp to Danzig.32 The importance of economic worth for encouraging religious tolerance was also true within the Dutch republic, at home and within its empire.33 Natalie Zemon Davis has illustrated that individuals were aware of the suddenness with which the ‘wheel of fortune might turn’ and, for this reason, there was a strategy for marrying some children close to home and others in distant cities.34 The significance of setting in shaping perceptions of those on the margins has led some scholars to move beyond Douglas’s categories of purity and danger to reconceptualize these groups in terms of waste in order to draw attention to the potential benefit that these groups were thought to bring to their settings.35 Medieval and early modern society emphasized the potential for waste to be reused, particularly in agriculture. This idea has been developed most fully by Derek Duncan, but Philip Gavitt has also explored such imagery in his work on Renaissance convents, suggesting that the women were thought of in terms of refuse and reuse, whereby nobles daughters who were unlikely to be able to marry could work for the city in piety and prayer.36 The original concept of waste was developed in relation to landscape, referring to areas which were uninhabited, uncultivated, in common or devastated, which reminds us of the benefit and use, as well as insalubrious connotations, that marginal space might have.37 The potential value of marginality underpinned the possibility for individuals to capitalize upon this status.38 David Rosenthal has pointed out that historians need to be careful not to reverse the centre-margin hierarchy. He cites an article which addressed a distinct field of study, by Cornelia Dayton Hughes, who asserted that in almost obsessive search for ‘agency’, ‘if we are talking about preindustrial ‘subaltern’ individuals or groups, it is all too easy to run the risk of claiming too much and of appearing

Introduction  7 politically naïve in the process’.39 Nevertheless, it is important to move away from an exclusively ‘top down’ perspective, emphasizing the solely restrictive or negative impact of the imposition of the label.40 There are examples of its value: Johannes Dillinger has pointed out that vagabonds and ‘Venetians’ (foreigners) were thought of as expert treasure hunters precisely because they were outsiders.41 In their discussion of Jews from different nations, Kagan and Morgan have written that the fact that they ‘were not part of a ruling elite, regardless of place and economic circumstance, played a key role in Jewish mobility, serving as both impetus and inducement to circulate. It made Jews an easy target for discrimination and unfair treatment; yet, at the same time, it gave them the freedom to shed one cultural milieu and embrace another’.42 Peter Mazur has described the New Christians of Spanish Naples as ‘a fragile elite’ and cited Jonathan Israel’s characterization of this group as simultaneously ‘agents and victims of Empire’.43 In 1699, a royal intendant, Marc Antoine Turgot, described the Jews as ‘ “a kind of republic and neutral nation”, able to travel easily and inexpensively, acquire accurate price information and move merchandise across borders because of their connections with fellow Jews’.44 Such an ambiguous status could bring with it commercial advantages, which were widely recognized for foreign merchants, as reflected in Andrew Spicer’s essay in this volume. Brian Pullan’s article on the Jew Righetto Marano in Renaissance Venice is a brilliant case study of an individual who manipulated his position within the social hierarchy.45 Pullan wrote that for the ‘much travelled Levantines . . . travelling, shifting a religion and putting on a new identity were things inseparably linked’ and also drew attention to cases of repeat converts, who changed their religion for small financial gains. As a result, Pullan issued a call to investigate the history of conversion as a series of biographical studies. This was intended to illustrate the co-existence of religious worlds and, what Pullan termed, ‘occasionalism’. Perhaps because of the development of the social margins as a field of study under the influence of interdisciplinary ideas, particularly anthropology and sociology, scholars have avoided undertaking individual case studies and extrapolating their broader significance.46 Researchers concerned with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may also have been discouraged from such an approach because of long-standing criticisms of Burckhardt’s characterization of the birth of the individual during the Renaissance. Nevertheless a number of seminal studies have illustrated that an approach which explores the idea of self-fashioning can yield a great deal.47 The works of Natalie Zemon Davis are particularly illuminating. In The Return of Martin Guerre she told the story of a man who was almost successful in usurping the identity of another, taking his place in his family, home and community.48 Her more recent study of Leo Africanus illustrated the way in which conversion might be viewed as an opportunity for reinvention and dissemblance; she describes the taqiyya, which was accepted by both Sunni and Shi’ite Islam, which

8  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw allowed ‘precautionary dissimulation of one’s faith and religious practices under circumstances of coercion’.49 The emphasis on reinvention is also relevant to the characterization of space in this period. Marginal land was commonly used for tanning and rubbish collection and some was redeveloped in the course of urban expansion as a result of population growth and urbanization between 1300 and 1800. Some of this building work was symbolic. The original Ghetto, established in Venice in 1516, was on an island within the city which had initially been used for the disposal of waste products from an iron foundry. In Amsterdam, a New Church in the Hague was built on a site where whorehouses had been, which was described as, ‘A happy conversion’, for ‘Houses of filth and uncleanliness turn’d into a house of prayer!’50 Louis XIII ordered that some Huguenot temples become Catholic churches, for example at La Rochelle.51 Specific spaces could also be affected by broader developments, as the boundaries of cities were altered through changes in land use and land reclamation. Between 1451 and 1492, for example, d’Este actions more than doubled Ferrara’s land area.52 During this period, space was also affected by the changing economic context of individual cities. Early modern Venice shifted from being predominantly a commercial entrepôt at the end of the fifteenth century into a site of manufacture altering the nature and population of particular districts.53 The characterization of urban sites could be altered by introductions such as street lighting, which, in Amsterdam in 1668, was thought to make the city safer by deterring thieves and preventing people from falling from the canal-side streets into the water but also acted as a boost to nightlife and prostitution.54 Urban space and the natural environment also have their own histories, which include temporary and ephemeral changes. The sounds produced by or for marginal groups in particular spaces, for example, emerge as important in a number of essays in this volume but are difficult to analyse in detail. Space could be manipulated through use of semi-permanent structures, such as ropes, chains, and gates.55 In seventeenth-century Hamburg, for example, wires and gates were set up forming an eruv, to link Jewish homes with the synagogue so that objects could be carried outside of the domestic sphere on the Sabbath. Often the land within which these gates were erected belonged to Christians and yet it temporarily reclassified public space as a private enclosure, Jewish territory.56 Space could be experienced differently according to the age, nationality or gender of the person passing through it.57 Its characterization did not simply alter over the longue durée; space was also used differently by day and night and on different days of the week. The changing of the seasons meant that the authorities expressed different concerns. In winter, for example, in early modern Germany it was thought to be even more important to get children off the street to prevent them lying ‘overnight on the streets wretchedly rotting and freezing’.58 Space was also used differently according to the liturgical seasons; Rome’s

Introduction  9 brothel, for example, was closed during Lent, so the Pope had to send food in.59 Despite the fixed image of contemporary city plans, these were urban settings which underwent periods of significant development and change.

II  Image and Practice The establishment of print culture stimulated the development of genres which emphasized the principle that form should reflect function in cities and societies. Maps and travel accounts linked the nature of the urbs with that of the polis, basing many of these connections on Greek humoural theory. The honour of a city in early modern Europe was thought to be achieved most effectively through a society which was ‘as far as possible sedentary and therefore controllable—both on the grounds of maintaining social order as well as for economic and fiscal reasons’.60 This meant that there was suspicion of, ‘Itinerant trades or professions whose form of work involved wandering, such as travelling players, musicians and circus folk’.61 Such movement also associated these groups with the spread of dangerous ideas or diseases. In the course of the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, for example, travel between Catholic and Protestant nations could suggest heretical leanings; Gypsies in England became associated with the spread of scrofula and witchcraft.62 Publications were designed to address concerns about the negative connotations of the unknown. There was widely recognized concern regarding dissemblance, deceit, secretive natures and disguise, which created an appetite for print genres such as the ‘liber vagatorum’.63 Examples of those who dissembled abound: in Venice, Giovanni Battista from Friuli was placed in a punitive cage or berlina at Rialto with a placard because he had ‘made himself yellow in order to go begging’ and, in other cases, simulated injury: shakes, bloodstained cap, a shrivelled arm around his neck.64 There was widespread concern that the able-bodied might be confused for the sick and the rich for the poor as a result of such activities.65 The widely developed image of early modern cities and societies as bodies illustrated the concern that individuals should know their place and purpose. As a result, many measures undertaken in relation to marginal groups attempted to ensure that image reflected identity, such as sumptuary legislation.66 These measures had a long history. The 1215 Fourth Lateran Council had required Jews and Muslims to be visibly labelled to prevent sexual relationships with Christians. In Florence in 1479 masks, veils or any artificial colouring ‘which is not natural and thereby impedes ready recognition’ were prohibited.67 Such policies were reinvigorated by the developments in print technology, which facilitated the circulation of costume books, to assist with the identification through clothing. The same concerns underpinned an interest in skin and its marks, including branding or war wounds.68 The disfiguring of the face was used as punishment.69 Valentin Groebner cites a Venetian law from 1443 that stated that the face was the

10  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw noblest part of the body and expressed a person’s honor; . . . the honor of the city as a whole was diminished when it harboured citizens with such disfigured faces’.70 The same ambiguity underpinned an interest in foreigners, travel and the impact of a cosmopolitan society in urban centres. The exhibition catalogue on ‘Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe’ displayed the ‘exoticism’ associated with the African continent and its inhabitants between 1450 and 1650.71 It illustrated the ambiguity of black skin, particularly in depictions in religious art. Cultural history has provided methodologies for teasing out the connections between representations and experiences, but there is more work to be done for groups on the social margins in terms of their artistic representation and material culture.72 In addition, such an interest in the representation of difference was not only enacted on a global scale. Joel Harrington has pointed out that, ‘Whether a rural village or a city-state of several thousand inhabitants, it was the local—defined by dialect, customs, dress, and so on—that primarily defined both insiders and outsiders, to the extent that people from only ten miles away might be considered ‘foreigners’ and others of different economic or social status were called ‘compatriots’.73 The literary and artistic distinctions between urban and country dwellers, and the seeming foreignness of one to the other, remind us of the differentiations that were often made within the bounds of a single locality.74 In the Dutch Golden Age, peasants and their rural festivals could represent a celebration of licentiousness or a moral judgement of base behaviour depending upon the viewer and circumstances. It is helpful to recognize, therefore, that there were multiple meanings attached to the images of the social and urban margins. The multiple distinctions which were drawn within single localities also extended to discussions of language. European cities were far from linguistically unified and did not possess vernacular centres and peripheries. Eric Dursteler has emphasized that ‘linguistic diversity was a fundamental and familiar feature rather than a cultural barrier between the multiplicity of people who inhabited the Mediterranean’s shores’.75 Foreign merchants, it was said, ‘alter[ed] not their language’.76 Travellers and merchants picked up ‘the lingua franca of Arabic and Italian words spoke on the Mediterranean and in its port cities’.77 Particular urban sites, associated with marginal groups, were also characterized as linguistic melting pots. The portrayal of the brothel by Francisco Delicado, a Spanish priest and physician who settled in Rome and composed a fictional account which was published in Venice in 1528, was as a site in which ‘the language heard was not a “perfect Castilian” but a mixed speech—popular Spanish phrases, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian and even an Arab word once in a while: “I tailored my speech to the sound of my ears” ’.78 Contemporary publications also expressed an awareness of the ‘jargons’ of marginal groups such as beggars and thieves.79 There were complex perceptions of languages in the past and these could be generically distinguished as ‘foreign’ or grouped together erroneously

Introduction  11 under the label of a single tongue (such as Romany). Over the period, it has been suggested that increasingly powerful states assumed control over language (within countries, territories, and empires).80 Peter Burke has written that, ‘Imagined communities, like other figments of the imagination, have real effect, and attempts to create communities by imposing a particular language or variety of language have important consequences, even if they are not always the consequences intended by the planners’.81 Like Blok’s reflections on the distinction between design and reality in the make-up of society, Burke highlights the process of the standardization of language as being subject to the same historical contingencies.82 Language played a part in constructing as well as conveying perceptions of marginality, from the impact of particular terms, to the strategies employed to overcome the boundaries imposed by different and unfamiliar languages, such as translation and the compilation of dictionaries.83 In the course of her analysis of Leo Africanus’s work in translation for the 1524 Arab-Hebrew-Latin dictionary, Natalie Zemon Davis quoted Umberto Eco on translation as a ‘movement between languages and also between cultures, as the translator seeks words that will bring about the same effect as those in the source language’.84 Sarah Pearsall’s work on the Algonquian family structure has illustrated the interest that the religious orders took in the language of these people, and the dictionaries they produced, in order to facilitate conversion and an abandonment of the practice of polygamy.85 Carla Boccato has shown that Jews in Venice’s Ghetto used notaries beyond their island and that their wills provide evidence of interaction with Christians, particularly in the identity of the witnesses. She analysed the language in which they were written (Italian with some Iberian, Venetian, or Hebrew words), which illustrated that the Jewish community was ‘strongly integrated into the city of Venice’.86 Defining the margins was interlinked with the ongoing process of defining community and, within this, language was an important social ligature. The petition of restitution studied by Joel Harrington, a written text which officially cleansed a family of executioners of the occupational taint on their honour, tells us much about the significance of language for overcoming formal marginality but much less about the impact such a document would have made upon the members of the community. Specific terminology could also be connected with attempts to define the status of particular groups—Sara Butler’s essay illustrates the difficulties which could be encountered when this was not done with precision. Other authors highlight the vocabulary which was associated with the marginal groups under consideration, including that of ruination, dirt and blackness, each of which carried a physical and moral association.

III Conclusion Despite the significance of the development of languages in this period, little of what survives was produced by those on the margins of society; as Derek

12  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw Duncan has asserted, ‘much is written about them yet little by them’.87 In order to draw together some of the ideas of this volume, it may be worth returning to the case of the Venetian courtesan with which we began. For here, some publications do survive which were written by those who experienced marginality in some forms. A letter by Veronica Franco, designed for publication in 1580, described her profession using language which is widely appropriated in connection with social marginality, and which appears in the chapters which follow: slavery, violation, infection, and disaster: To pledge one’s body and one’s energies to this slavery . . . is an experience altogether too unhappy and too repugnant to human feelings. To offer oneself as a prey to so many at the risk of being stripped, robbed, killed or deprived in a single day of all that you have earned in so many, with so many other risks of injury or of contagious and revolting diseases; to eat with the mouth and sleep with the eyes of another, to move at another’s desire, always heading plainly towards the shipwreck of one’s life and possessions: what greater misery could there be? What riches, pleasure or luxury can compensate for so heavy a burden?88 Courtesans are well-studied examples of individuals whose stories emphasize the contrast between image and reality. Their experiences could be volatile and uncertain. During their working lives, they often moved between urban districts and strata of wealth. They could participate in significant ritual or political events, such as Veronica Franco’s meeting with the French King Henri III.89 They were generally not poor but could be perceived as a threat, particularly during episodes of warfare and disease, and their numbers in urban centres tended to be vastly overestimated. Their representations were often prominent within travel accounts, fictional tales and costume books. Nevertheless, it would be naïve to overestimate the degree of agency possessed by these figures. Such women also remind us of the colourful nature of the history of the margins. The historiography of this subject is often characterized as ‘grey’, placing emphasis on the ambiguous status of those who were considered to be marginal. In fact, it was full of colour, in its language and material culture and the mosaic-like picture which is produced by the case studies in this volume confirms this area as a vibrant field of research.

Notes 1 http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/686/vittore-carpaccio-hunting-onthe-lagoon-recto-letter-rack-verso-italian-venetian-about-1490–1495, accessed 26 March 2015. 2 For illustrations of the fact that marginality cannot be equated with minority status, see Derek Duncan, ‘Margins and Minorities: Contemporary Concerns?’ in Stephen J. Milner (ed.), At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (Minneapolis MN, 2005), pp. 22, 26.

Introduction  13 3 Despite reliance on excellent work by specialists writing on poverty (as discussed in more detail below), historians of the social margins have undervalued the cyclical and temporary nature of marginality. As Jean Luis Vives (1493–1540) wrote, ‘whoever is in need of help by another is poor, and requires compassion’, cited in Sabine MacCormack, ‘Social Conscience and Social Practice: Poverty and Vagrancy in Spain and Early Colonial Peru’ in Nicholas Howe (ed.), Home and Homelessness in the Medieval and Renaissance World (Notre Dame IN, 2004), p. 92. Research on prostitution is an exception to this. It has been recognized that involvement in this trade depended upon fluctuating economic circumstances; beyond this the fluid nature of marginality has only been considered in a partial manner. 4 Anton Blok, Honour and Violence (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 1, 6. 5 Blok, Honour and Violence, pp. 45–58 notes that many infamous occupations provided essential services and worked with healing and cleaning, were transient and seasonal workers could create monopolies and, therefore, wealth. This is a field of study with a number of important contributions, including that by Kathy Stuart whose monograph features artisans and guilds as agents of ‘defining dishonor and pollution’ in her book, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1999). 6 In the context of early modern Jews, David Ruderman has called for works which ‘delineate those characteristics of early modern Jewry that were relevant beyond one specific geographic area’ as cited in Debra Kaplan, Beyond Explusion: Jews, Christians and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford CA, 2011), p. 197. 7 Fabrizio Nevola and David Rosenthal, Urban Communities in Early Modern Europe (1400–1700): A  Research Review (2011), p. 5, www.earlymodern­ communities.com. 8 The literature on the topic of witchcraft is vast, but a useful starting point is Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (Oxford, 2002). 9 Kaplan, Beyond Explusion. 10 Lance Lazar, ‘The First Jesuit Confraternities and Marginalized Groups in Sixteenth-Century Rome’ in Nicholas Terpstra (ed.), The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 138, 148. 11 Standard points of reference include R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250 (Oxford, 2007). 12 Cited in Michael Halvorson and Karen E. Spierling (eds), Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2008), p. 6. Anton Blok too has emphasized the cohesive contribution of conflict: ‘the fiercest struggles often take place between individuals, groups and communities that differ very little or between whom differences have greatly diminished’ in his Honour and Violence, p. 5. 13 Shannon McSheffrey, ‘Stranger Artisans and the London Sanctuary of St Martin le Grand’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43 (2013), 562. 14 Nevola and Rosenthal, Urban Communities, pp. 5–6. The literature on communities is extensive but key volumes include Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004); Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester, 2000); Katherine A. Lynch, Individuals, Families and Communities in Europe, 1200–1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society (Cambridge, 2003). Halvorson and Spierling (eds), Defining Community considers the religious dimensions of communities. The important role of guilds and confraternities has also been widely established.

14  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw 15 An example of the influence of ideas about the poor on characterizations of the marginal is Robert Jütte’s Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994). This is an indispensable volume but it contains extensive information on poverty and very little on deviance—the idea being, presumably, that you can learn what you need to about the second group by reading about the first. A forthcoming textbook in the same series by Penny Roberts and Andrew Spicer will consider the issue of early modern deviance in greater depth. 16 See Yacov Guggenheim, ‘Meeting on the Road: Encounters Between Ger man Jews and Christians on the Margins of Society’ in R. Po-Chia Hsia and H. Lehmann (eds), In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 125–37. 17 Mary Elizabeth Perry, Crime and Society in Early Modern Seville (Hanover NH, 1980), p. 19. 18 Mary Laven, ‘Cast Out and Shut in: The Experience of Nuns in CounterReformation Venice’ in Milner (ed.), At the Margins, pp. 93–110. 19 Sharon Strocchia, ‘There are Always Cracks in the Wall’ in Nevola and Rosenthal (eds), Early Modern Communities, p. 74. 20 Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘Seen and Known: Prostitutes in the Cityscape of LateSixteenth-Century Rome’, Renaissance Studies 12 (1998), 392; Richard Trexler, ‘Correre la terra: Collective Insults in the Late Middle Ages’ in his Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence (Binghamton NY, 1994). 21 Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford, 2011), pp. 164–65. 22 Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution in Renaissance Ferrara’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60 (2001), 411; Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts, Chapter 6: ‘The Executioner’s Healing Touch: Health and Honor in Early Modern German Medical Practice’, pp. 149–85. 23 See the comments on centres and peripheries in Philippe Braunstein, ‘Cannaregio, zona di transito?’ in Donatella Calabi and Paola Lanaro (eds), La città italiana e i luoghi degli stranieri XIV—XVIII secc (Laterza, 1998), p. 52; Keith P. Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France (Washington DC, 2005). 24 Alfred Haverkamp, ‘The Jewish Quarters in German Towns During the Late Middle Ages’ in Hsia and Lehmann (eds), In and Out of the Ghetto, p. 27. 25 See Edward Muir and Ronald Weissman, ‘Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence’ in John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan (eds), The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Social Imaginations (Boston, 1989). Architectural features such as baptisteries, for example, were placed centrally in Northern Italian cities as visual representations of the significance of the ritual which initiated members into urban communities. 26 Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2005), p. 12. 27 See Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2006) and Elma Brenner’s work, including her essay in this volume. 28 Donatella Calabi, ‘The Jews and the City in the Mediterranean Area’ in Alexander Cowan (ed.), Mediterranean Urban Culture 1400–1700 (Exeter, 2000), p. 68. 29 Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 406. See also Jane Stevens Crawshaw’s essay in this volume. 30 Joel F. Harrington, ‘Child Circulation Within the Early Modern Urban Community: Rejection and Support of Unwanted Children in Nuremberg’ in Halvorson and Spierling (eds), Defining Community, p. 113. For fascinating, new concerns regarding time see Max Engammare, On Time, Punctuality and Discipline in Early Modern Calvinism (Cambridge, 2013).

Introduction  15 31 The significance of the broader context for shaping perceptions of Renaissance Jews is emphasized in Stefanie B. Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Cconstruction of an Early Modern Religious Community (Stanford CA, 2005), p. xviii. In scholarship on the history of the Jews, many historians have noted the need to distinguish between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. The treatment of the Jews also varied significantly according to political contexts; the house of Este and Jewish community were said to have had ‘unusually good relations’. Francesca Trivellato, ‘The Port Jews of Livorno and their Global Networks of Trade in the Early Modern Period’ in David Cesarani and Gemma Romain (eds), Jews and Port Cities 1590–1990: Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism (London, 2006), p. 36; Miriam Bodian, ‘ “Men of the nation”: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe’, Past and Present 143 (1994), 48–76; Elliott Horowitz, ‘Jewish Confraternal Piety in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara: Continuity and Change’ in Terpstra (ed.), The Politics of Ritual Kinship, pp. 150–71. Jews within the Portuguese Empire received different treatment if they were in North Africa as opposed to Asia. Jews in Dutch Suriname settled during the seventeenth century and became prosperous landowners and slave owners. The children of these Jewish owners and their slaves were raised as Jews. Formal conversion was permitted with proviso that ‘mulatto Jews and Sephardim who married them would be considered secondclass Jews—congregantes—rather than full-fledged members of the local community’. Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore MD, 2009), p. xiv; Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (London, 2010), p. 136 illustrates that the Spanish crown was ‘keen to ensure religious orthodoxy among those people immigrating to the Indies’ but sent Morisco silk makers despite this, for economic reasons. 32 Donatella Calabi and Stephen Turk Christensen (eds), Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, Volume II: Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, 2007), part two. 33 Jonathan Israel and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil (1624–54) (Amsterdam, 2007). 34 Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge MA, 2003), pp. 12–13. 35 Gregory Martin described the early modern world as one where light and dark, cleanliness and dirt played a necessary role in creating order: ‘le cose sporche hanno un posto necessario e contribuiscono all’ordine che è nell’universale stato del mondo intero’ cited in Bernard Aikema and Dulcia Meijers (eds), Nel regno dei poveri: arte e storia dei grandi ospedali veneziani in età moderna, 1474–1797 (Venice, 1989), p. 22. 36 Duncan, ‘Margins and Minorities’, pp. 21–35; Philip Gavitt, Gender, Honor and Charity in late Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2007), p. 117. 37 Duncan, ‘Margins and Minorities’, pp. 21–35. 38 Dora Dumont, ‘Women and Guilds in Bologna: The Ambiguities of ‘Marginality’’, Radical History Review 70 (1998), 4–25. 39 David Rosenthal, ‘Owning the Corner: The “Powers” of Florence and the Question of Agency’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16 (2013), 182. 40 Works abound but useful introductory volumes include Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe (eds), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2005); Bert de Munck and Anne Winter (eds), Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (Aldershot, 2012); Andreas Gestrich, Lutz Raphael and Herbert Uerlings (eds), Strangers and Poor People: Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion in Europe and the Mediterranean World from Classical

16  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw Antiquity to the Present Day (Frankfurt am Main, 2009); Thomas Betteridge (ed.), Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2007). 41 Johannes Dillinger, Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America: A History (Basingstoke, 2012), p. 80. 42 Kagan and Morgan, Atlantic Diasporas, p. x. 43 Peter A. Mazur, The New Christians of Spanish Naples, 1528–1671: A Fragile Elite (Basingstoke, 2013). 44 Marc Antoine Turgot cited in Davis, Women on the Margins p. 17. 45 Brian Pullan, ‘ “A ship with two rudders”: “Righetto Marrano” and the Inquisition in Venice’, Historical Journal 20 (1977), 25–58. 46 Milner (ed.), At the Margins is heavily influenced by anthropological ideas (particularly the introduction) and brings the historiography of the margins to bear on the notion of the Renaissance. 47 This concept was developed in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago IL, 1980). 48 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge MA, 1983). 49 Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: The Search for Leo Africanus (London, 2007). 50 Van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, p. 34. 51 R. J. Knecht, Richelieu (London, 1991), p. 79; Andrew Spicer, Calvinist Churches in Early Modern Europe (Manchester, 1997), pp. 204–5. 52 Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 413. 53 John Jeffries Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (London, 1993), p. 161. 54 Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A  History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2011). 55 Haverkamp, ‘Jewish Quarters’, p. 22. 56 Davis, Women on the Margins, pp. 42–3. 57 See, for example, the role of gender analysed in Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 403; Dennis Romano, ‘Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice’, Journal of Social History 23 (1989), 229–353. 58 Harrington, ‘Child Circulation’, pp. 113, 117. 59 Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 403. 60 Robert W. Scribner, ‘Mobility: Voluntary or Enforced? Vagrants in Württemberg in the Sixteenth Century’ in G. Jaritz and A. Müller (eds), Migration in der Feudalgesellschaft (Frankfurt on Main, 1988), pp. 65–88. 61 Ibid. 62 David Cressy, ‘Trouble with Gypsies in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal 59 (2016), 45–70. 63 Ibid., p. 65. 64 Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Oxford, 1971), p. 303. 65 Scribner, ‘Mobility: Voluntary or Enforced?’, p. 302 references cases from sixteenth-century Venice whereby blind or lame beggars who had accumulated sufficient funds were considered inappropriate for begging. 66 Clothing and identity, as well as the measures enacted to regulate perceptions of the two, have been a focus for important, recent historiography. See, for example, Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2010), particularly chapter five ‘Looking at Others’ pp. 177–210; Evelyn Welch, ‘Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies 23 (2009), 241–68; Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2002). 67 ‘fuor del naturale in modo che non fussi chiaramente conosciuto’ in Stephen J. Milner, ‘ “Fanno bandire, notificare, et expressamente comandare . . .”. Town

Introduction  17 Criers and the Information Economy of Renaissance Florence’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16 (2013), 128. 68 The enduring nature of these concerns can be seen in Jonathan Reinarz and Kevin Siena (eds), A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface (London, 2013). 69 Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, translated by Pamela Selwyn (New York, 2008). 70 Ibid., p. 76. 71 Joaneath Spicer (ed.), Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore MA, 2013). 72 Exceptions include Sean Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (Manchester, 2002); Keith P.F. Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (Chicago IL, 1989); Tom Nichols (ed.), Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe: Picturing the Social Margins (Aldershot, 2007). Work on the Jews in art has been, broadly, ahead of the field and include Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg (eds), Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (Philadelphia PA, 2011); Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia PA, 2008) which explores the relationship between representation and presence in culture. 73 Harrington, ‘Child Circulation’, p. 103. 74 See, for example, the catalogue by Anna Tummers, Herman Roodenburg, Thijs Weststeijn and Marieke de Winkel (eds), Celebrating in the Golden Age (Rotterdam, 2011) for vivid representations of the relationship between the image and associations of peasants and middle-class urban elites. 75 Eric R. Dursteler, ‘Language and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean’ in John Watkins and Kathryn L. Reyerson (eds), Mediterranean Identities in the Premodern Era (Aldershot, 2014), pp. 35–52. 76 Jacob Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (Aldershot, 2010), p. 85. 77 Davis, Trickster Travels, p. 58. 78 Ibid., p. 210. 79 Burke, Languages and Communities, pp. 30–31; Perry, Crime and Society, pp. 30–2. 80 See Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, p. 5. 81 Cited in Halvorson and Spierling (eds), Defining Community, p. 21. 82 Blok, Honour and Violence, pp. 1, 6. 83 See, for example; Paul Wexler, ‘Language in Contact: The Case of Rotwelsch and the Two “Yiddishes” ’ in Hsia and Lehmann (eds), In and Out of the Ghetto, pp. 109–25, 131. 84 Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels, p. 224. 85 See her forthcoming monograph, Beyond One Man and One Woman: A History of Early American Polygamy. 86 Cited in Joanne M. Ferraro, Venice: History of the Floating City (Cambridge, 2012), p. 93. 87 Duncan, ‘Margins and Minorities’, p. 29. 88 Cited in Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor, p. 392. 89 Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago IL, 1992).

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Part I

Health

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2 Marginal Bodies and Minds Responses to Leprosy and Mental Disorders in Late Medieval Normandy Elma Brenner

While the sick and the impaired were recipients of charity in the Middle Ages, they also provoked less positive responses, particularly in the later medieval period, when anxiety grew about the spread of disease via people’s sick and impoverished bodies. An examination of social, legal, and religious responses to the leprous and those with mental disorders in late medieval Normandy sheds light on the complex dynamics of marginality and integration in this society. While the effects of leprosy, which resulted in facial disfigurement and damage to the bodily extremities, were highly visible, mental disorders by definition affected the mind, not the body. Nonetheless, it is evident that the physical signs of mental afflictions, especially the violent, frenzied behaviour of the ‘mad’, played a role in shaping responses to the mentally disordered. This chapter explores the status of leprosy sufferers and individuals with mental disorders within late medieval Norman society. A broad distinction is made today between those with mental illnesses (acute or chronic) and those with mental impairments. This categorization is sometimes useful when examining sources from medieval Normandy, where the mad and deranged are often distinguished from the stupid, idiotic, and foolish. Nonetheless, occasionally disorders are conflated, as in a document of 1466 from Carentan (Lower Normandy) that describes a man as being both mad and an idiot.1 Given this fluidity of terms, the discussion that follows aims as far as possible to reflect the terminology for mental disorders contained in the documents themselves. The chapter first considers where the bodies of affected individuals were placed, in terms of care and confinement within both institutions and the local community. While many of the leprous were physically marginalized in leper houses located outside towns and cities, there were apparently no specialized institutions for those with mental disorders in late medieval Normandy. These people were often confined instead within monasteries, prisons or their family homes. The second section examines the issue of public health and safety, arguing that marginalization was motivated by concern about the spread of disease (leprosy) and the threat of violence against people and property (mental disorders). At the same time, provisions for lepers and the mentally disordered indicate that the well-being of the sick and the

22  Elma Brenner impaired was also taken into account. The final section surveys the language and labels used to designate the leprous, the mentally ill and the mentally impaired, considering how the descriptive terms used may reflect stigma or compassion, and how individuals were described by themselves and their relatives. Although affected persons were prevented from participating fully in society, they nonetheless remained members of that society, and their treatment reflects support as well as marginalization. Normandy was an important component of the kingdom of France in the later Middle Ages, marked out by its rich agricultural resources and the status of its largest city, Rouen, as one of the major trading centres of north-western Europe. Rouen was strategically located on the river Seine, and had a large population, habitually experiencing influxes of strangers as a result of commerce. The maritime orientation of Normandy as a whole facilitated trade with England and northern Europe. The region had a longstanding relationship with England, having been part of the Anglo-Norman realm between 1066 and 1204. From 1337 to 1453 Normandy was a key theatre of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. The war resulted in social dislocation and food shortages, increasing the vulnerability of the sick and impaired. Plague outbreaks and flooding also occurred in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, affecting all levels of Norman society. Normandy’s social dynamism, with the acute difficulties of the time, brings the situation of the needy and vulnerable to the fore in the source material for the later Middle Ages. The period generated very rich written sources, which enable us to investigate responses to the leprous and those with mental disorders from a number of different perspectives.

I  Placing Bodies: Separation, Confinement and Care Leper houses, often monastic or quasi-monastic institutions, were situated outside the walls of medieval towns and cities, apparently signifying the exclusion of lepers. At Rouen, Normandy’s chief city, the two principal leper houses, Mont-aux-Malades and Salle-aux-Puelles, were situated to the north-west and south-west, respectively, while several smaller institutions were located elsewhere around the city. The Old Testament instructs that lepers should live ‘without the camp’ (Leviticus 13:46), and some historians have viewed the extra-mural location of leper houses as evidence for the firm exclusion of lepers from society.2 Indeed, Canon 23 of the Third Lateran Council (1179) laid down provisions for ‘lepers, who cannot dwell with the healthy or come to church with others’, implying that the biblical precept was followed in practice, and that, for various reasons, it was not possible for lepers to remain in mainstream society.3 However, many monastic houses, not only those that served as leprosaria, were sited in suburban zones or more remote areas.4 There were several reasons for this topography: land outside towns was cheaper and more readily available, and offered a calmer setting for religious worship and the care of the

Marginal Bodies and Minds  23 sick. Some monasteries and leprosaria, such as the Benedictine house of La Trinité-du-Mont at Rouen, Mont-aux-Malades and the leper house of St Nicholas Harbledown, outside Canterbury (England), were positioned on hilltops, granting their residents access to the health-giving benefits of pure air. Leper houses were often situated along the main roads into and out of cities, enabling their communities to attract the alms of passing travellers. Rural sites also offered great agricultural and commercial potential to religious communities, for example by enabling them to host annual fairs.5 The physical removal of leprosaria should, furthermore, not be overemphasized. Most such institutions were located within reach of towns and cities, and in some instances, such as at Bayeux, Lisieux, Falaise and Avranches, leper houses were situated in proximity to the gates or walls.6 At Rouen, a document of 1283 mentions a ‘cabin’ for lepers at the northeastern gate, the Porte Saint-Ouen.7 This ‘cabin’ was probably a simple structure that temporarily accommodated lepers who had been required to leave the city, before they found more permanent shelter in one of the leprosaria, or it housed those who had been prevented from entering Rouen via this gate. It may have had only a brief existence, since no other documentary references to it survive. While this ‘cabin’ stood on a marginal piece of land, a ditch where earth was stored for use in the cloth industry, it was also located at a focus of traffic of people, animals and goods into and out of the city, as well as being very near the abbey of Saint-Ouen, Rouen’s largest monastery. Its existence reveals that it was possible for lepers to be found on the very thresholds of cities, thus remaining a feature of urban life, and a constituency that people could expect occasionally to encounter. Gates were an important stopping point for travellers, and it is possible that the leprous begged at the Porte Saint-Ouen and other gates around Rouen.8 In addition, lepers periodically received alms in the heart of the city, at the cathedral, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In April 1478 the cathedral chapter forbade lepers from gathering at the doors on Sundays and feast days, suggesting that at this time this was customary practice.9 A testament of 1304, reflecting the wishes of Jean Hardi of the Rouen parish of Saint-Martindu-Pont, endowed an alms distribution for lepers at the cathedral.10 It thus appears that some leprous individuals were able to enter the city occasionally to be supported by alms, although this practice was curbed in the later fifteenth century, by which time attitudes towards lepers were less positive than in previous centuries. While lepers benefited from specialized institutional care in the central and later Middle Ages, there were no comparable institutions for those with mental disorders in Normandy. Nonetheless, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, monasteries sheltered the mentally ill and cognitively impaired. In the early twelfth century, for example, a suicidal woman was cared for at the Benedictine nunnery of Saint-Amand at Rouen.11 The midthirteenth-century visitation records of Eudes Rigaud, Archbishop of Rouen (1248–75) describe the presence of mentally impaired individuals at several

24  Elma Brenner monastic houses in Upper Normandy, such as, in the 1250s, the Cistercian nunnery of Bondeville, located in the valley of Bapaume seven kilometres from Rouen.12 The role played by Norman monasteries may have continued into the later medieval period. A handful of English religious communities, often hospitals, also catered for those with mental disorders, including the priory of St Mary of Bethlehem, London, which began to provide for the mad in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century and was the first specialized mental institution in England.13 Monasteries were closely associated with the care of the sick, with religious women, especially Cistercian nuns in the thirteenth century, playing an important role in providing for the sick poor, including the mentally afflicted.14 A monastic setting facilitated the care of the souls of those with mental disorders, an appropriate activity since mental illness was sometimes attributed to sin or demonic possession. A biblical precursor for the latter notion was King Saul, who suffered mental distress as a result of his affliction by a bad spirit (I Samuel 16:14–23). The chronicler Gaspar Ofhuys (1456–1523) equated the mental disorder of the Flemish artist Hugo van der Goes, who became ill some years after he entered the monastery of the Red Cloister near Brussels in 1477, with Saul’s illness. Like Saul, whose disorder was alleviated through the harp playing of David, music was played to improve Hugo’s condition, although in his case music had no beneficial effect.15 Yet although monastic communities provided spiritual as well as bodily care to those with mental disorders, monasteries also offered an ideal setting for the confinement and restraint of the mentally ill who were violent or disruptive. Imprisonment was a key concept in medieval Christianity, associated with both purgation (atoning for one’s sins) and the attainment of spiritual liberation and redemption through suffering in confinement.16 Enclosure and confinement also played an important practical role in monastic houses, where it was considered essential to prevent apostasy and the infiltration of lay people into the cloister, and to discipline the religious who disobeyed the monastic rule or committed crimes. From as early as the eleventh century, many monasteries were equipped with their own prisons, which housed both their own members who had transgressed and criminals from the secular world outside.17 The monastic precinct also had clear boundaries vis-à-vis the world outside, whether the religious house had an urban location, like Rouen’s abbey of Saint-Amand, or a rural position, like the priory of Bondeville. Thus, the mentally ill or impaired enclosed within monasteries were spatially segregated in a manner comparable to the situation of lepers within leprosaria, and those within rural monastic houses were, like lepers, placed at a physical distance from towns and cities. From at least the thirteenth century, some large-scale urban hospitals for the sick poor in France included the mentally ill within their scope. For example, in the fourteenth century mental patients from the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris were being sent to visit the shrine of St Mathurin at Larchant, one of

Marginal Bodies and Minds  25 the key religious sites associated with the healing of the mad. At another major healing shrine, that of St Acaire at Haspres in the Pas-de-Calais, a hospital specifically for the mad was established by Abbot Odo of SaintVaast of Arras in 1218.18 The mentally ill and cognitively impaired were also placed in secular contexts, including secular prisons. The famous Tour aux Fous (also known as the Tour Chatimoine) of Caen, Normandy’s second city, a tower within the city walls located close to the abbey of SaintÉtienne, did not begin to confine mad people until the second half of the seventeenth century.19 Nonetheless, municipal prisons were a feature of Norman cities, as elsewhere in Western Europe, in the central and later Middle Ages. The prison of Le Stinche in Florence, founded c. 1300, had a specific area in which the insane were accommodated.20 However, although such prisons controlled the movement of the mad, along with that of the sick and women, more than that of other prisoners, the permeability of these institutions to people from outside meant that they did not fully isolate the mad from mainstream society.21 Whether the mentally ill were confined or cared for within a hospital, monastery or prison, or remained within the community, there is much evidence to suggest that it was customary to restrain these people and curtail their freedom of movement, at least if their behaviour justified such control. In 1466 at Carentan, a blacksmith was instructed to put into chains a certain Guillaume Maugier, described as ‘mad, an idiot and out of his senses’, who had been imprisoned by royal officers ‘for the mad and singular things he did, and because none of his relatives wanted to look after him’.22 At the turn of the fifteenth century, the hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem, London, possessed iron chains with locks, iron manacles and stocks, indicating that patients were physically restrained when necessary.23 It is likely that, despite the institutional options that could be available, the majority of mentally ill or cognitively impaired individuals remained within the family or the local community.24 Mental disorders differed from leprosy in that there was no biblical injunction to remove sufferers. Nor was mental disturbance understood in itself to transmit disease, although plague and other contagious diseases were understood to result in mental illness, with miasmatic air listed among the causes of mental disorders by medical writers.25 Nonetheless, the physical restraint of the mentally ill was clearly sometimes necessary within familial or community contexts. On 15 December 1464, the civic government of Rouen made a charitable gift of forty sous to Isabelle, a poor woman, the widow of Colin Leboucher. Isabelle received this money because she had a daughter who, for roughly a year, ‘has been troubled by anger and is in such a state that she has to be locked up and closed up in her room’.26 Isabelle’s daughter was clearly suffering from a mental affliction that resulted in violent, unpredictable behaviour. Unlike Guillaume Maugier, the daughter was receiving family care, presumably within her home; yet she too was restrained. While in many respects the mentally ill and mentally impaired were more socially

26  Elma Brenner integrated than the leprous, both groups were treated differently from members of mainstream society, above all in terms of the restriction of their freedom of movement.

II Public Health and Safety Although leprosy sufferers and individuals with mental disorders were provided for in late medieval Normandy, both within and outside institutions, it is evident that their presence provoked concern about the health and wellbeing of society as a whole. Anxieties about leprosy were linked to ideas about the spread of disease via corrupt air (miasma) that gained in currency following the Black Death (1347–50). While pestilence was understood to be transmitted through noxious air, the unpleasant smells that exuded from the mouths and sores of lepers were believed to transmit leprosy from person to person.27 Concern about mentally ill and mentally impaired people, on the other hand, derived from the disruption and damage that they could cause through their behaviour. The municipal authorities of late medieval Rouen clearly possessed a concept of public welfare, since a document of 28 June 1432 regulating two new butcheries in the city refers to the ‘common public good’.28 As in other European cities, the curtailment of the spread of disease formed an essential part of the communal welfare aims of Rouen’s civic government. Nonetheless, the late medieval understanding of public health was markedly different from that of the twenty-first century. Religious ideas played a central role in the Middle Ages, from the notion that plague was a manifestation of divine punishment, to the moral component of civic regulations for cleanliness and order. Furthermore, there was a different conception of disease, based on the Galenic humours and the non-naturals, and a different understanding of the manner of disease transmission.29 It is thus important for late medieval public health measures to be understood ‘on their own terms’, and not from a teleological perspective that assumes progress towards modern-day epidemiology.30 While late medieval Normans did not share our current understanding of how leprosy and other diseases are transmitted, it is clear that they were aware of the need to take action to prevent the spread of disease, above all with regard to the threat posed by miasmatic air. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, leprosy was increasingly viewed as a contagious disease. Arabic medical texts newly translated into Latin, particularly Avicenna’s Canon, discussed infection and contagion in relation to disease causation, especially the risks posed by proximity to the sick. The physician Pietro of Abano (d. 1315 or 1316) and other medical writers argued for the role of corrupt air in causing leprosy.31 The so-called ‘Lepers’ Plot’ of 1321, when lepers and Jews were accused of poisoning the waters of the kingdom of France so that people would die or become leprous, reflects a climate of suspicion of lepers and concern about contagion.32 Fears regarding contagion increased significantly following the Black Death,

Marginal Bodies and Minds  27 and there were sometimes drives for the segregation of lepers when plague epidemics occurred. In 1363, the surgeon Guy de Chauliac categorically described corrupt air and physical contact with lepers as the primary conduits of transmission of the disease.33 Anxieties regarding leprosy and contagion were clearly felt in Normandy. The above-mentioned June 1432 statutes regarding new butcheries in Rouen, issued by the bailli of Rouen and Gisors and later confirmed by King Charles VIII of France (1483–98) in November 1487, prohibited butchers from selling any ‘beast whatever it is that comes from a leper house’.34 This suggests a belief that livestock reared at leprosaria could become infected with leprosy, and that humans who consumed their meat would in turn contract the disease. Such concerns could well have increased the marginal status of lepers, most obviously by making it difficult for leper communities to sell their agricultural produce, and thus decreasing their revenues. As we have seen, lepers were barred from begging at Rouen cathedral in 1478, a move which was also no doubt linked to public health concerns. At Amiens in Picardy similar restrictions were put in place progressively following the plague outbreak of 1457–59, to curtail the participation of lepers in processions within the city on All Saints’ Day and during Easter.35 While the specific characteristics of leprosy provoked anxiety about miasma, lepers also formed part of the wider category of the sick poor, increasingly attributed with spreading disease. The vagrant poor in particular were believed to bring diseases with them when they entered new places.36 The minutes of a discussion of members of Rouen’s civic government regarding plague on 13 October 1499, following an outbreak in two urban parishes, testify to such concerns. The councillor Pierre de Quevremont stated that ‘with regard to . . . the poor sick, one must forbid them from communication among the people’.37 Less positive responses to the leprous in the later Middle Ages, therefore, must be understood in the context of broader, interlinked concerns about poverty, the spread of disease and threats to the civic order. Although mental illness and mental impairment were not understood to be communicable in the same manner as leprosy and plague, the volatile, violent behaviour of certain affected individuals, particularly the insane, was clearly perceived as posing a threat to public safety. The Summa de legibus Normannie in curia laicali, a Norman customary law code drawn up in Latin in the last third of the thirteenth century, reveals an understanding that the mad should be restrained but also provided for, by their guardians or the local community.38 Chapter 78, De amentibus (‘On the mad’), first states: If however someone put out of his mind by his madness should kill or maim anyone, he must be delivered in perpetuity to prison and sustained from his own [property], or there must be provision for his sustenance from the common alms.39

28  Elma Brenner The specification that a mad person who killed or injured another person should be imprisoned for the rest of his or her life indicates a concern to protect the community, but perhaps also to inflict a measure of punishment on the mad person for his or her wrongdoing. Even if the person was not technically considered responsible for his or her action, it could still have been considered necessary to demonstrate to others that such an action was morally wrong. The instruction that, if the person’s own property could not support him or her, the community was to supply alms, indicates that it was believed to be important to support these individuals, although in the first instance they were to be maintained independently. Chapter 78 of the Summa de legibus goes on to state: If however someone should be so mad and so frenzied that it must be feared lest his madness should cause disorder in the locality in terms of the common health of life or of property, through fire or through some other deed of his, the person should be guarded and held tied up by those who hold his possessions, lest he should cause a wrongdoing to someone; and if he should have nothing, the whole neighbourhood should exhibit purposefulness and assistance from its own resources towards restraining the person’s madness.40 The Summa de legibus instructs that measures should be put in place to prevent mad individuals from acting violently or causing damage to property. These individuals are not to be imprisoned, but they are to be physically restrained and watched over, either by the guardian of their property or by the local community. The detail regarding the oversight of the mad person’s property suggests that it was customary for someone else to take responsibility for his or her affairs and act as a guardian; presumably, this was often a family member. However, if the mad person did not have any property, it would appear that no such arrangement was in place, and it fell to the community to restrain the person. It is noticeable that the Summa de legibus aims to protect not only people, but also property, anticipating that mad people will cause damage by starting fires or committing other acts.41 Nonetheless, arson also posed a severe danger to human life and indeed to the community’s very existence, and the reference to ‘the common health of life’ suggests that the behaviour of the mentally ill was perceived as a threat to communal well-being and survival in the same vein as, from the midfourteenth century, leprosy and plague.42 Although the Summa de legibus reveals the theoretical legal position regarding the mad in later thirteenth-century Normandy, it is important to consider whether or not (as far as one can deduce) these legal tenets were observed in practice.43 A remission letter issued more than a century after the law code was drawn up, in January 1425 by King Henry VI of England (1422–61, 1470–71; disputed king of France 1422–53) via his regent, Duke John of Bedford, during the English occupation of Normandy

Marginal Bodies and Minds  29 in the Hundred Years’ War, does refer explicitly to the law code’s provisions regarding the mad.44 Remission letters granted royal pardon for crimes that were usually punishable by death, following a supplication by a criminal or members of their family. While the first French remission letter was issued in May 1304, the practice had a longer history in England.45 The remission letter of January 1425 concerns the case of Jehannecte, daughter of Thomas Troppé and widow of Thomas Baillet, formerly of the parish of Maisy (in the viscounty of Bayeux in Lower Normandy). Jehannecte is presented as a ‘poor pregnant woman, aged seventeen or thereabouts’.46 The emphasis on her poverty, pregnancy and youth may well have been a rhetorical device in the initial supplication letter presented by her ‘relatives and immediate family’, to attract sympathy for her case.47 Although she had previously been of ‘good sense’ and had lived peacefully with her husband, about fifteen days before the previous feast of All Saints (thus, around 17 October 1424), while she was in bed with her husband, ‘a sudden vision came to the said woman, which made it seem to her that her husband had left her side and gone out of the house’.48 Jehannecte, beset by ‘melancholy’ and ‘anger’, got up, tore her clothing, and broke her pots and pans.49 The next day she threw flour all over the house, ‘as if completely demoniacal, without telling her husband why she was doing these things’.50 Her husband attributed her behaviour to ‘frenzy and melancholy’ and ‘the illness of a saint or something else’, but hoped ‘that she would return to her good sense’.51 However, a few weeks later, on 4 November, when Jehannecte was in bed with her husband and her eleven-year-old brother, she had another vision ‘through bad temptation of the enemy’, in which she believed that there were two people in the room with her (presumably, not her husband and brother).52 This caused her to strike her husband over the head with a rock several times.53 After this, the two people she thought had been there were gone. When Jehannecte saw her husband ‘distressed and mutilated’, she was ‘like a foolish person, not knowing what she did or said; she did not leave through doubt or fear of anything, not knowing that she had done the said deed.’54 About eight days later, Jehannecte’s husband, who remained in the house untreated, died. The officers of justice arrested the woman and she was imprisoned in Bayeux. Her supplicants appealed to the fact that she and her unborn child would die in prison. Nonetheless, the remission letter established finally that: ‘She will stay in prison in perpetuity or will be otherwise held in secure guard, considering her case, according to the custom of our duchy of Normandy, to ensure that she does not commit any injury or other wrongdoing in the future . . .’.55 This arrangement appears to refer to both of the instructions contained in Chapter 78 of the Norman customary law code. While the law code instructed that mad people who committed murder should be perpetually imprisoned, it stated that the mad who showed the potential of threatening life or property, rather than having done so, should be physically restrained by their guardians or the community. Although

30  Elma Brenner Jehannecte had actually killed her husband, the remission letter provided the option of her restraint outside a prison context, suggesting that here the law code was interpreted flexibly, taking account of the woman’s pregnancy and vulnerability. Either way, however, her freedom of movement was to be curtailed, underlining the importance of protecting the community from the actions of the mentally ill.

III  Language and Labelling In modern-day discourse, the language associated with leprosy, mental illness, and mental impairment is complex, varied and sometimes controversial. Leprosy is now technically known as Hansen’s Disease, and the words ‘leper’ and ‘leprosy’ can have derogatory connotations today. Scholars differ over whether it is appropriate to use these terms in academic writing. Both the historian Luke Demaitre and the archaeologist Charlotte Roberts carefully avoid using the word ‘leper’; Demaitre refers instead to ‘patients’ or ‘people with leprosy’.56 However, in contrast, the historian of leprosy in medieval England Carole Rawcliffe chooses to use both the terms ‘leper’ and ‘leprosy’. She is highly aware of the stigma associated with these words today, but argues that they did not have exactly the same connotations in the Middle Ages; furthermore, she aims to examine leprosy ‘through the eyes and speech of medieval men and women’, who did use these terms.57 In this chapter I follow the latter approach, since I too wish to convey the language used by contemporaries, in relation to mental disorders as well as leprosy. Furthermore, as historians widely recognize, it would be anachronistic to refer to Hansen’s Disease with respect to medieval Europe, since diseases change biologically over time. Modern-day definitions of mental illness and mental incapacity are constantly evolving: for example, the spectrum of disorders to be included under the label of ‘autism’ has frequently been redefined in recent decades.58 In 2011, C. F. Goodey underlined the large number of different names that were used to refer to what he terms ‘intellectual disability’ in the preceding century. His study of the early modern period shows that ‘intellectual disability’, like other forms of disability, varies according to historical and social context, since specific contexts determine the extent to which an individual is able to participate in daily life, and thus whether or not he or she is disabled.59 Similarly Irina Metzler has underlined the need for medieval historians to be aware of the difference between ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’. While the physical (or mental) condition of an impaired person constitutes their impairment, disability is ‘the social construction of an impairment’.60 The range and fluidity of modern-day definitions and terminology relating to mental disorders, and the historical relativity of disability, indicates that we should be sensitive to how the concepts and language relating to mental disorders and leprosy may also have varied during the Middle Ages, according to place, social and religious context, and precise time period. Equally,

Marginal Bodies and Minds  31 where possible we should avoid the retrospective application of modern-day ideas and terms to the medieval period.61 By the later Middle Ages, there was clearly a stigma attached to the language used to describe lepers and leprosy, although the disease and its sufferers still retained biblical associations, especially with the suffering of Christ. Lepers were labelled (in Latin) leprosus, infirmus, and misellus, and (in French) lépreux, ladre, and mesel. Misellus and the French derivative mesel denoted compassion, translating as ‘poor little one’. In contrast, the terms for a begging leper, leprosus extraneus (Latin) and lépreux forain (French), implied that such lepers were strangers and perhaps, by implication, unwelcome. Three documents from fourteenth-century Rouen shed light on the nuances of the language of leprosy. In the first quarter of the fourteenth century, entrance gifts were made on behalf of two men entering the leper house of Mont-aux-Malades. In 1312, Pierre de Saint-Gille donated ten livres of Tours and two houses and land in the parish of Saint-Martin-sur-Renelle, Rouen. He did this ‘by necessity of the disease by which I am inhabited’ and ‘to be received in the community of the sick of the said place, to be with them all the course of my life, and to have the goods of the house like one of the sick brothers’.62 Just over a decade later, in 1323, Jean Le Vilein donated twenty livres of rent to Mont-aux-Malades, so that his brother Laurent Le Vilein could be received as a brother there and have access to the goods of the house ‘like one of the other brothers of his condition’.63 In both these donation charters, written in French, the use of the words ‘leper’ and ‘leprosy’ is carefully avoided. Pierre de Saint-Gille’s charter describes his ‘madie’ (‘maladie’—disease or sickness) and refers to the ‘communaute des malades’ (community of the sick) at the leper house. The language of Jean Le Vilein’s charter is even more delicate, alluding nonspecifically to his brother’s ‘condition’ (condition). The size of the donations suggests that wealthy individuals were involved in these transactions, quite possibly high-status Rouen merchants. Within their social milieu it may well have been problematic to label oneself or a close family member as a ‘leper’, and explicitly to acknowledge the presence of the disease. This suggests that there was a stigma attached to these words, and that leprosy was socially and emotionally difficult to confront. In contrast, later in the fourteenth century another man, Gillet Le Geloux, was explicitly described as a ‘leper’. Gillet’s wife received a welfare payment of thirty sous from the civic government of Rouen in 1392, recorded in the 1390–93 register of municipal deliberations. By this point it appears that Gillet was deceased, and the city was assisting his widow, who was evidently poor. The register calls him a ‘ladre’, the familiar colloquial term for ‘leper’.64 Thus, in a dispassionate document whose compilers presumably had no personal ties to the man in question, the stigmatic label was readily applied, indicating that the words ‘ladre’ and ‘lépreux’ were widely used in Rouen’s society. Distinctions of social status may also be at play here. Perhaps ‘ladre’ was a term associated with poorer lepers who did not

32  Elma Brenner necessarily enter leprosaria, whereas higher-status leprous individuals were referred to more euphemistically as being ‘sick’. The language used in late medieval sources (legal texts, chronicles, miracle accounts and medical treatises) to refer to mental disorders is wideranging and varied, indicating that people distinguished between many different manifestations of mental illness and mental impairment, and did so flexibly. Frequently used terms include demoniacus, freneticus, alienatio mentis, amens, mente captus, demens, furiosus, and subactus vesaniae.65 While certain labels, such as demoniacus, have specific connotations (here, the action of demons upon the afflicted person), others, particularly amens and demens, are used in multiple ways to signify forms of madness and mental disturbance, from acute, permanent insanity to temporary emotional distress. Sara M. Butler has observed that, although a broad range of terms is used to describe the mad in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English legal records, insanity is associated most strongly with manic, disruptive behaviour—thus, with highly visible signs of mental disorder.66 Physical impairment, albeit temporary, may also sometimes result from mental affliction: an account of a miracle that occurred between 1261 and 1270 at Rouen describes how a distressed, suicidal young man from the parish of Saint-Pierre-le-Portier lost his ability to hear, speak and move until St Dominic intervened to heal him.67 The extent to which terms relating to mental illness and impairment were stigmatic is more difficult to determine than with respect to the language of leprosy. Demonic possession was a very serious issue, and the label demoniacus could well have carried stigma with it, as well as provoking fear and anxiety regarding the afflicted person and their actions. More generally, since some theological explanations of mental disorder associated it with sin and moral deviance, any of the terms denoting mental illness or impairment could potentially have had derogatory connotations.68 Nonetheless, it is difficult to discern stigma in texts relating to late medieval Normandy. In a letter that admittedly marks her royal pardon, the behaviour of Jehannecte, daughter of Thomas Troppé is described in terms of demonic possession, melancholy and frenzied anger; yet we do not detect a negative judgement of the woman.69 ‘Frenzy’ and ‘melancholy’ are terms that originate in medical texts, showing how their language permeated through to the lay discourse on madness, although one should not necessarily expect such treatises themselves to be free from moral judgement or stigma.70 The mention of a mad woman in the Norman chronicle of Pierre Cochon, composed in the first half of the fifteenth century, also presents an interesting perspective. Cochon describes a brief encounter in the 1330s, early in the Hundred Years’ War, between Godfrey of Harcourt, a supporter of Edward III, King of England, and a lone mad woman. The meeting took place near the leper house of Salle-aux-Puelles, in the suburb of Petit-Quevilly on the left bank of the Seine opposite Rouen. Godfrey was on his way to the city, and, in seeking news about the state of Rouen, ‘he met no one who would

Marginal Bodies and Minds  33 tell him’.71 In the area of Salle-aux-Puelles, ‘the only person he found was a mad woman, at the edge of the woods in the direction of Rouen, seeking alms from those who passed along the road’.72 The woman gave Godfrey news: King Philippe (Philippe VI of France) and his forces had taken Rouen, and had destroyed two arches of the bridge because it was known that King Edward was approaching; there was ‘very great fear at Rouen’.73 Having sought the mad woman’s testimony as a last resort, Godfrey considered it to be valid (indeed, her knowledge of current events is indicative of a level of lucidity). The chronicle describes her as a ‘good woman’, implying respect and sympathy for this mad woman.74 It is possible that the disruption of war caused a distorted perspective, and that this positive language reflects the woman’s role in providing much-needed information. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that she was out begging, which suggests that the mentally ill did customarily receive alms. Although she was wandering alone, without institutional care or that of her family, friends or community, she expected to receive support from passers-by. The war could have caused care arrangements for her to break down; she could also have become mad as a result of traumatic events brought about by the war, which was in general causing ‘very great fear’. In this specific historical context, mental illness and emotional distress may have been less unusual phenomena.

IV Conclusion It is clear that, in late medieval society, lepers, the mentally ill and the mentally impaired stood out and required special treatment. Although at first glance it appears that the leprous were the more overtly marginalized group in Normandy, this chapter has demonstrated that the issue of marginality, in both its spatial and its social senses, is very complex. While ideas changed over time about how disease was spread, there was also evidently a wide range of responses to lepers and to individuals with mental disorders at any one point in time. As David M. Turner argues in this volume with respect to disabled people in early modern England, the sick and the disabled in the past had diverse experiences, shaped by economic, social and cultural factors.75 In the later Middle Ages, fear undoubtedly influenced responses in some instances: with the dread of plague widespread in this period, many people also feared the possibility of being afflicted by mental illness or leprosy.76 Concerns about communal welfare were interwoven with these responses. Such anxieties related above all to the bodies of the afflicted: lepers’ bodies were understood to emit miasma that transmitted disease, while the mentally ill and impaired could behave violently, inflicting damage on persons and property through the physical actions of their bodies. As a result, measures were put in place to keep lepers out of urban areas and to restrain the mentally ill. Nonetheless, in many contexts of confinement and restraint, lepers and those with mental disorders also received care. Indeed, although some of the language used to describe sufferers may reflect stigma,

34  Elma Brenner other terms convey sympathetic, compassionate attitudes. Evidently, members of mainstream society sought not only to distinguish lepers and those with mental disorders, but also to take responsibility for them. This pastoral approach reflected the example set by the Church and the secular authorities and, above all, the fact that the leprous, the mentally ill and the mentally impaired remained members of the Christian community. Individuals who were sick, impaired or different were often not fully integrated in Norman society, yet they were by no means fully excluded from it.

Notes 1 ‘fol, idiot et hors du sens’. Jean-Claude Capelle, ‘Les Prisons civiles en Normandie aux XIVème et XVème siècles’, mémoire de Maîtrise, University of Caen (1971), p. 258. 2 For the view that lepers were physically removed from society in leper houses, see, for example, Saul N. Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca NY, 1974), pp. 73–4. 3 ‘leprosis qui cum sanis habitare non possunt et ad ecclesiam cum aliis convenire’. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, edited and translated by Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols (London, 1990), I, p. 222. 4 The terms ‘leprosarium’ and ‘leper house’ are used interchangeably in this chapter. 5 On the topography of leper houses and hospitals, see Carole Rawcliffe, ‘The Earthly and Spiritual Topography of Suburban Hospitals’ in Kate Giles and Christopher Dyer (eds), Town and Country in the Middle Ages: Contrasts, Contacts, and Interconnections, 1100–1500 (Leeds, 2005), pp. 251–74; Leonie V. Hicks, Religious Life in Normandy, 1050–1300: Space, Gender and Social Pressure (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 21–3. 6 Hicks, Religious Life, p. 21. 7 ‘Bordelli leprosorum’. Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale, Tiroir 324, folder 1, eighteenth-century? copy of an act of the bailli of Rouen, December 1283, f. 2. Although I consulted this document in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Rouen, the deposit from which it is drawn, the municipal archive, is now housed in the Archives départementales de Seine-Maritime, Rouen (hereafter ADSM). 8 Rawcliffe, ‘Earthly and Spiritual Topography’, p. 263. 9 ADSM, G2140, f. 120. 10 ADSM, G1236, G7137. 11 The case is recorded in a letter of Abbess Marsilia of Saint-Amand written in 1107 or soon after. See Henri Platelle, ‘Les Relations entre l’abbaye SaintAmand de Rouen et l’abbaye Saint-Amand d’Elnone’ in La Normandie bénédictine au temps de Guillaume le Conquérant (XIe siècle) ([Lille], 1967), pp. 86–96, 104–6; The Normans in Europe, edited and translated by Elisabeth van Houts (Manchester, 2000), pp. 80–4 (no. 23); Medieval Writings on Secular Women, translated by Patricia Skinner and Elisabeth van Houts (London, 2011), pp. 167–71 (no. 78). 12 Regestrum visitationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis: Journal des visites pastorales d’Eude Rigaud, archevêque de Rouen. MCCXLVIII–MCCLXIX, edited by Théodose Bonnin (Rouen, 1852), pp. 111, 348; The Register of Eudes of Rouen, translated by Sydney M. Brown and edited by Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies, vol. 72 (New York, 1964), pp. 127, 395. 13 Jonathan Andrews et al., The History of Bethlem (London, 1997), pp. 80–2; Carole Rawcliffe, ‘The Hospitals of Later Medieval London’, Medical History

Marginal Bodies and Minds  35 28 (1984), 4, 8, 14–15, 20; Wendy J. Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 223–4. 14 On the role of Cistercian nuns in catering for the sick, see Anne E. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Ithaca NY, 2011), Chapter 4. 15 Peter Murray Jones, ‘Music Therapy in the Later Middle Ages: The Case of Hugo van der Goes’ in Peregrine Horden (ed.), Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy Since Antiquity (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 120–1, 123–4. 16 Guy Geltner, The Medieval Prison: A  Social History (Princeton NJ, 2008), pp. 82–6; Megan Cassidy-Welch, Imprisonment in the Medieval Religious Imagination, c. 1150–1400 (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 2–4, 15–16, 19. 17 Penelope D. Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession: Religious Women in Medieval France (Chicago IL, 1991), p. 202. 18 Muriel Laharie, La Folie au Moyen Âge, XIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris, 1991), pp. 181, 183–4, 204–5. 19 Claude Quétel, ‘Un Archétype de l’horreur carcérale: la Tour Chatimoine’, Annales de Normandie (special issue: Recueil d’Études offert en hommage au doyen Michel de Boüard, Volume I) (1982), 510–11, 518. 20 Geltner, Medieval Prison, pp. 3, 66, 155 n. 58. Florence’s first specialized hospital for the mad, that of Santa Dorotea, was not established until 1642, despite the importance of late medieval Florence as a centre for hospital care. [Duccio Vanni], ‘Santa Dorotea’ in Donatella Tombaccini et al. (eds), Florence and its Hospitals: A History of Health Care and Assistance in the Florentine Area (Florence, 2008), pp. 94–5. 21 Geltner, Medieval Prison, pp. 67, 72–3. Also see pp. 1–5 on the shift towards containing, rather than eliminating, deviant people in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 22 ‘fol, idiot et hors du sens’; ‘pour les follies et singularitées qu’il faisoit et pour ce que il n’y avoit aucun de ses amys qui le vousise recuillir’. Capelle, ‘Prisons civiles’, p. 258. 23 Rotha Mary Clay, The Mediaeval Hospitals of England (London, 1909), p. 33; Turner, Care and Custody, p. 224 and n. 58. 24 See Turner, Care and Custody, pp. 213, 230. 25 In his De proprietatibus rerum (completed c. 1245), for example, Bartholomaeus Anglicus describes the causes of insanity as miasma, corrupt humours, ‘passions of the soul’ and the consumption of melancholic food or strong wine. ’49. ‘Scholastic Medicine Popularized: Bartholomaeus Anglicus on Diseases of the Head and of the Mind’ in Faith Wallis (ed.), Medieval Medicine: A Reader, Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures, vol. 15 (Toronto, 2010), pp. 253–4. 26 ‘est troublee par courroux et est en tel estat que il la fault enfermer et ferrer et tenir en chambre’. ADSM, Archives de la Ville, Déliberations, Registre A8, f. 226; Documents concernant les pauvres de Rouen: extraits des archives de l’hôtel-de-ville, edited by G. Panel, 3 vols (Rouen, 1917–19), I, pp. xxxv, 7. 27 I discuss public health concerns arising from leprosy in Elma Brenner, ‘Leprosy and Public Health in Late Medieval Rouen’ in Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe (eds), The Fifteenth Century XII: Society in An Age of Plague (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 128–32. 28 The ‘bien commun de la chose publique’. ‘Statuts des bouchers vendant dans les halles du Vieux-Marché et de la Porte Beauvoisine, à Rouen’ in Claude de Pastoret (ed.), Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race, vol. 20 (Paris, 1840), pp. 39–45. 29 See Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 5–6.

36  Elma Brenner 30 See G. Geltner, ‘Public Health and the Pre-Modern City: A Research Agenda’, History Compass 10 (2012), 231–2. 31 François-Olivier Touati, ‘Contagion and Leprosy: Myth, Ideas and Evolution in Medieval Minds and Societies’ in Lawrence I. Conrad and Dominik Wujastyk (eds), Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 185–98. 32 On this ‘plot’, see Malcolm Barber, ‘Lepers, Jews and Moslems: The Plot to Overthrow Christendom in 1321’, History 66 (1981), 1–17. 33 Luke Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body (Baltimore MD, 2007), p. 140; Touati, ‘Contagion’, p. 198. 34 ‘beste quelle qu’elle soit qui vienne de maladerie’. ‘Statuts des bouchers’, p. 42. 35 Neil Murphy, ‘Plague Ordinances and the Management of Infectious Diseases in Northern French Towns, c. 1450–c. 1560’ in Clark and Rawcliffe (eds), The Fifteenth Century XII, pp. 156–7. 36 See ibid., pp. 157–8. 37 ‘en regard de ceulx que les pauvres mallades on leur doit deffendre la communication parmi le peuple’. ADSM, Archives de la Ville, Déliberations, Registre A9, f. 318. 38 Coutumiers de Normandie, Tome II: La Summa de legibus Normannie in curia laicali, edited by Ernest-Joseph Tardif (Rouen, 1896; reprinted Geneva, 1977), pp. 192–3. 39 ‘Si autem aliquis extra mentem constitutus sua demencia aliquem interfecerit vel mehaigniaverit, perpetuo est carceri mancipandus et de suo sustinendus, vel communibus elemosinis ejus vite sustentationi est providendum’. Ibid., p. 192. 40 ‘Si autem aliquis demens talis fuerit et taliter furibundus quod de ejus demencia timendum sit ne per ignem vel per factum ejus aliquod saluti communi vite vel rerum obvians patriam valeat perturbare, per eos qui res suas habent debet custodiri et ligatus teneri, ne per ipsum alicui maleficium inferatur; et si nihil habeat, totum confinium debet consilium et auxilium ad sue demencie refrenationem de suis facultatibus exhibere’. Ibid., pp. 192–3. 41 On Norman customary law’s preoccupation with the protection and inheritance of property, see Michèle Blanchère, ‘La Société médiévale face à la folie: étude menée sur le territoire de la Normandie’, mémoire de Maîtrise, University of Caen (1997), pp. 171–2. 42 See Aleksandra Pfau, ‘Protecting or Restraining? Madness as a Disability in Late Medieval France’ in Joshua R. Eyler (ed.), Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations (Farnham, 2010), pp. 102–3, noting (p. 103) that ‘a blaze begun in one house could quickly spread to the entire neighborhood’. 43 On the practical observation of English common law regarding insanity and suicide in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Sara M. Butler, ‘Representing the Middle Ages: The Insanity Defense in Medieval England’ in Wendy J. Turner and Tory Vandeventer Pearman (eds), The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe: Examining Disability in the Historical, Legal, Literary, Medical, and Religious Discourses of the Middle Ages (Lewiston NY, 2010), pp. 128–30. 44 Remission granted to Jehannecte, widow of Thomas Baillet, formerly of the parish of Maisy (département Calvados, arrondissement Bayeux, canton Isigny), for killing her husband in a fit of madness, January 1425. Actes de la chancellerie d’Henri VI concernant la Normandie sous la domination anglaise (1422–1435), edited by Paul Le Cacheux, 2 vols (Rouen, 1907–8), I, pp. 181–4 (no. 75; reference to Norman customary law on p. 183). This letter is discussed in: Capelle, ‘Prisons civiles’, p. 258; Aleksandra Pfau, ‘Crimes of Passion: Emotion and Madness in French Remission Letters’ in Wendy J. Turner (ed.), Madness in Medieval Law and Custom (Leiden, 2010), pp. 120–21. Later in his reign, Henry VI

Marginal Bodies and Minds  37 of England himself suffered recurrent episodes of mental illness, beginning in July 1453. 45 Pfau, ‘Crimes of Passion’, pp. 100 and n. 11; Helen Lacey, The Royal Pardon: Access to Mercy in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 1, 3 n. 9. 46 ‘povre femme grosse, aagée de xvii ans ou environ’. Actes de la chancellerie d’Henri VI, I, p. 181. 47 ‘parens et amis’. Ibid., I, p. 181; see Pfau, ‘Crimes of Passion’, p. 104. 48 ‘bon sens’; ‘feust venue a ladicte femme une vision soudaine, qui lui sembloit que sondit mary s’estoit parti d’auprès d’elle et alé ailleurs hors de sa maison’. Actes de la chancellerie d’Henri VI, I, pp. 181, 182. 49 ‘telle merancolie . . . tel courroux’. Ibid., I, pp. 181–2. 50 ‘come toute demoniacle, sans dire a sondit mary pour quoy elle faisoit ces choses’. Ibid., I, p. 182. 51 ‘frenaisie et merencolie . . . mal de saint ou autrement . . . qu’elle retournast en son bon sens’. Ibid., I, p. 182. ‘Mal de saint’ presumably refers generically to conditions associated with particular saints that had the power to heal them, such as, for example, the mal de saint Fiacre (signifying haemorrhoids, tumours and cancers). 52 ‘par temptacion mauvaise de l’ennemi’. Ibid., I, p. 182. 53 Rocks also appear in English sources in association with fatal injury and madness: see Butler, ‘Representing the Middle Ages’, pp. 126, 129. 54 ‘navré et mutillé’; ‘come une personne socte, non sachant qu’elle faisoit ou disoit, ne pour doubte ou crainte de quelconque chose ne se parti, non sachant avoir fait ledit fait’. Actes de la chancellerie d’Henri VI, I, p. 183. 55 ‘Elle demourra en prison perpetuelle ou sera autrement tenue en seure garde, consideré son cas, selon la coustume de nostre duchié de Normandie, pour eschever qu’elle ne face ou temps avenir peril ou autre inconveniant . . .’. Ibid., I, p. 183. 56 Demaitre, Leprosy, pp. x–xii; Charlotte A. Roberts, ‘Conference Background and Context’ in Charlotte A. Roberts, Mary E. Lewis and Keith Manchester (eds), The Past and Present of Leprosy: Archaeological, Historical, Palaeopathological and Clinical Approaches (Oxford, 2002), p. v. 57 Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 11–12. 58 See Uta Frith, Autism: Explaining the Enigma (Oxford, 2003), p. viii, noting that ‘autism is still full of mystery’. 59 C. F. Goodey, A History of Intelligence and ‘Intellectual Disability’: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe (Farnham, 2011), pp. 1–2, 4. 60 Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment During the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (London, 2006), pp. 2–4. 61 See Wendy J. Turner, ‘Introduction’ in Turner (ed.), Madness in Medieval Law and Custom, pp. 1–2, 8, 10. 62 ‘pour la necessite de la madie dont jestois ocupe . . . pour moy recevoir en la communaute des malades du dit lieu pour estre avveques eulz tout le cours de ma vie et pour avoir des biens de lostel aussi comme un des freres malades’. ADSM, 25HP1; Bruno Tabuteau, ‘Les Léproseries dans la Seine-Maritime du XIIe au XVe siècle’, mémoire de Maîtrise, University of Rouen (1982), p. 118. 63 ‘comme un des autres freres de sa condition’. ADSM, 25HP1; Tabuteau, ‘Léproseries’, p. 128. 64 ADSM, Archives de la Ville, Déliberations, Registre A2 (1390–93), f. 85v; Documents concernant les pauvres de Rouen, I, p. 4. 65 Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages. Volume I: The Violent Against Themselves (Oxford, 1998), p.  322; Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Susanna Niiranen, ‘Perspectives to Mental (Dis)Order in Later Medieval Europe’ in Sari

38  Elma Brenner Katajala-Peltomaa and Susanna Niiranen (eds), Mental (Dis)Order in Later Medieval Europe (Leiden, 2014), p. 10. 66 Butler, ‘Representing the Middle Ages’, pp. 125–8. 67 ‘Miracula quae Rothomagi in Normannia ab anno Christi MCCLXI usque ad annum MCCLXX contigerunt’ in Acta sanctorum Augusti, edited by J. Carnandet, 6 vols (Paris, 1867–68), I, pp. 644–5; Mathilde Cordonnier, ‘L’Église, les fidèles et la mort, à travers des miracles de saint Dominique (Rouen, 1261– 1270)’, Tabularia ‘Études’ 8 (2008), 51–2. 68 See Katajala-Peltomaa and Niiranen, ‘Perspectives’, pp. 9, 11. 69 Actes de la chancellerie d’Henri VI, I, pp. 181–4. 70 Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, for example, discusses melancholy and frenzy: see ‘49. Scholastic Medicine Popularized’ in Wallis (ed.), Medieval Medicine, pp. 252–4. 71 ‘s’il encontrerent [sic] aucun qui li deist’. Chronique normande de Pierre Cochon, notaire apostolique à Rouen, edited by Charles de Robillard de Beaurepaire (Rouen, 1870), 66–8 (p. 67). 72 ‘ne trouva que une folle fame qui estoit au bout du bois vers Rouen à demander l’omosne à cheus qui passoient le chemin’. Ibid., p. 67. 73 ‘très grant effroy à Rouen’. Ibid., pp. 67–8 (p. 68). 74 ‘bonne fame’. Ibid., p. 68. 75 See below David M. Turner, ‘ “Not so Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour”: Disability and “Marginality” in Late Seventeenth- and Early EighteenthCentury England’, p. 39–56. 76 For example, King Duarte of Portugal (1433–38) feared both plague and succumbing to great sadness: Iona McCleery, ‘Wine, Women and Song? Diet and Regimen for Royal Well-Being (King Duarte of Portugal, 1433–1438) in Katajala-Peltomaa and Niiranen (eds), Mental (Dis)Order, pp. 180–81.

3 ‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’ Disability and ‘Marginality’ in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England David M. Turner The status of disabled people as a ‘marginal’ group facing barriers to citizenship, economic participation and social inclusion may seem self-evident. Indeed, the history of disability over the last hundred years or so has been dominated by attempts to deal with the problems of disability’s ‘marginality’. On the one hand, the movement towards rehabilitation, which gathered pace after the First World War, was geared towards restoring people with disabilities—men in particular—to the workforce and ‘rescuing’ them from a life of dependency and institutionalization. Indicative of the ‘medical model’ of disability, clinical specialties such as orthopaedics have tended to regard disability as a problem awaiting solution, an individual pathology judged primarily by its amenability to medical intervention.1 On the other hand, since the 1960s and 70s, disabled people themselves have spoken out against exclusion, highlighting the ways in which barriers to citizenship lie as much in the social, spatial and political organization of society as they do in an individual’s medical condition—the ‘social model’ of disability. Campaigns to improve access to buildings and services, for the recognition of disabled people’s needs as being distinctive from others, and for independent living have not just been about improving the lives of people with disabilities, but also challenging the attitudinal and environmental barriers and institutional constraints that have marginalized disabled people from mainstream society.2 Modern disability activism focuses on protecting people with disabilities from cuts to welfare benefits and services that threaten a return to the segregation and ‘marginalization’ suffered by disabled people in earlier times.3 But how useful is the concept of ‘marginality’ to understanding disability historically? It is easy to assume that ‘marginality’ is an unchanging and inevitable feature of disabled people’s experiences throughout history. This was the view of orthopaedic surgeon Sir Robert Jones in 1924, reflecting on the lives of people with disabilities in the centuries before modern rehabilitative medicine offered the chance of a ‘cure’ for their impairments and a new quality of life. The history of the ‘cripple’, he observed, was ‘unequalled in its tragic sequence of obloquy and neglect’, moving from being regarded as

40  David M. Turner the ‘embodiment of magic’ in ancient times to ‘the estate of public mockery’ in the Middle Ages. During the early modern period, ‘when Puritans sought for the hand of God in all things, normal and abnormal, the cripple was frowned upon as an outcast, and crawled through his miserable distorted life as an example of divine punishment’.4 However, as scholars have devoted more serious attention to the history of disability, so a more complex picture is beginning to emerge, one which questions the relationship between disability and ‘marginality’ and challenges the assumptions that underpin it. Brendan Gleeson, for example, has warned of the dangers of ‘projecting disabled people’s relatively recent experience of service dependency and marginalisation through the entirety of past social formations’.5 Assuming a necessary link between disability and poverty, he argues, risks a ‘beggared’ history of disability in which experiences of people with impairments in the past are reduced to a ‘saga of vagabondage and marginality’.6 Furthermore, to categorize people with disabilities as ‘marginal’ in the past assumes that the ‘disabled’ existed as a distinctive ‘group’ in past societies. Historians have begun to question the extent to which the ‘disabled’ were defined as sharing common ‘special needs status’, at least before the late nineteenth century.7 This lack of group identity might have increased impaired individuals’ sense of isolation, although this was seldom discussed in pre-modern sources. As Iain Hutchison has argued, disability may have been considered a matter of degree of impairment rather than denoting a distinctive section of the community that stood out by their ‘difference’.8 Beyond this, confining people with disabilities to the margins is also problematic as disability could be a fluid state, ‘which could appear and dissolve in various ways’.9 Throughout history the boundary separating disabled from non-disabled people has not been sealed or fixed since accidents, illness and chronic conditions could ‘propel the non-disabled person into the world of the disabled at any time’.10 Disability therefore provides an interesting case study for exploring conceptualizations of marginality and ‘otherness’ in the pre-modern past. To what extent did early modern disabled people stand out for their ‘difference’ or were treated as ‘outcast’ or ‘marginal’ by their contemporaries? This chapter argues that viewing disability simply through the lens of marginality and exclusion ignores the wide range of experiences of ‘disabled’ people in the early modern past. Instead, we need to look at the social, economic, cultural, political and institutional contexts in which the ‘marginality’ of people with a variety of impairments became visible. This chapter begins by exploring in more detail the ways in which historians have approached disabled people in the past and evaluates different modes of thinking about social inclusion or exclusion of people with impairments in the early modern period. The chapter then goes on to examine these themes in greater detail via an analysis of the portrayals of inhabitants of the Shropshire village of Myddle as provided by its famous early eighteenth-century chronicler, the antiquarian Richard Gough. Gough’s History of Myddle is

‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’  41 well known among social historians of early modern England for the light it sheds on family life and social structure in this rural community.11 It is also a rich source for historians of disability, containing some remarkably detailed biographies of the village’s inhabitants with physical, sensory and mental impairments over several generations. Although a single case study may not necessarily be typical of attitudes towards disability in this period, it allows us to explore the complexity of perceptions and the ways in which representations of disability’s ‘otherness’ intersected with other discourses of inclusion and exclusion in this period.

I  Approaching Disability and Marginality Although people with disabilities might experience stigmatization or economic marginality in any period of history, a view has emerged in modern Disability Studies that regards the ‘marginalization’ of disability as the product of a process of historical development which intensified between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. Prior to the early modern period, it has been argued, although there may have been some institutional responses to types of disease or disability such as the communities of ‘lepers’ examined by Elma Brenner elsewhere in this volume, disabled people rarely stood out for their difference and simply melted into the crowd of the poor.12 Nevertheless, according to a common model adopted in Disability Studies, from the seventeenth century onwards a variety of measures slowly began to marginalize disabled people economically and emphasize their ‘otherness’. In the first place, the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 cemented the link between disability and dependency in its provisions for the ‘lame, blind and impotent’ poor. Secondly, the ‘otherness’ of people with congenital disabilities became ingrained in popular culture as popular journalistic accounts of ‘monstrous’ births often speculated that the physical aberrations of children were a consequence of moral infractions such as adultery, incest, or impiety on the part of their parents. At the same time, the public display of ‘freaks’ appeared to encourage mockery of physically different performers or lurid speculation about their lives.13 Beyond this, the eighteenth-century development of workhouses, hospitals and educational institutions for blind and deaf children is seen as heralding a shift towards institutional solutions to problems caused by disability and poverty, and also placed definitions of disability on an increasingly medicalized footing.14 According to materialist histories of disability, industrialization served to exacerbate these divisions and increased the marginality of those unable to adapt to the rigours of heavy labour or time discipline. Industrialization meant that people with impairments were unable to sell their labour power on equal terms with others and also led to a growing separation of home and work which disadvantaged those who, in spite of impairment, had been able to make a contribution to an essentially agrarian economy organized

42  David M. Turner around household manufacture.15 The result, it is argued, was increasing impoverishment, segregation and stigmatization of people with disabilities. The historical geographer Brendan Gleeson has mapped this increasing marginalization of disabled people in spatial terms. Since the household functioned as a unit of production in the medieval and early modern periods, impaired people were better able to contribute to the economy. Disability was therefore ‘located’ in the household as part of a supportive economy and seldom ‘marked itself out’ as different unless it was ‘seen to have spiritual significance’. In contrast, he argues, many representations of disability during the Industrial Revolution locate disabled figures in street settings ‘usually as displaced figures’, rendered economically unproductive by new regimes of labour based on the factory rather than the household and ‘marginalized both from formal public spaces and domestic realms’.16 This framework of development thus presents disability in the early modern period in somewhat contradictory terms. On the one hand, the pre-industrial economy is represented—if not exactly as a ‘golden age’ for people with disabilities—as one which integrated people with disabilities relatively easily; on the other, the disabled are presented as increasingly stigmatized through cultural representations of monstrosity, or cast in passive and dependent roles by new regimes of welfare. Yet many of these arguments remain untested by detailed historical research. As Anne Borsay has argued, materialist disability histories rely on a questionable chronology of industrialization that incorrectly assumes a rapid transition to factory production, while underestimating the complexity of the pre-industrial economy in relation to disability.17 Historians are starting to explore in more detail the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion affecting people with various impairments in the premodern past. In the first place, one of the fundamental assumptions about the stigmatization of people with disabilities—that disability was viewed commonly as punishment for sin—has been challenged by closer analysis of the place of disability in medieval and post-Reformation theology. Irina Metzler has demonstrated how the link between disability and divine punishment was not automatically made by medieval theologians. Whilst it is true that some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants sought to draw moral lessons from the birth of prodigiously ‘deformed’ children, ‘projecting onto their diminutive bodies a silhouette of the sins which had infested the body politic’, this position was not consistently taken.18 Indeed, Luther argued that it was consoling to believe that a person’s ailments came from God and that the infliction of suffering was a method by which God led people in the way of the cross.19 And whilst Calvin saw the paths of people’s lives as predestined, he refused to conclude that people with physical or sensory impairments were particularly stigmatized above others. In commenting on the biblical story of the man born blind in John 9, Calvin argued that it was not a question of whether the man’s impairment was the result of his own or his parent’s sins, but rather that as all people were sinful

‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’  43 by nature, those with disabilities were no more to blame than anyone else.20 Conscious of the way in which prodigies had been harnessed to political causes in the mid-seventeenth century conflicts, Restoration Anglican religious conduct literature more commonly extolled the virtues of bearing with affliction as a means of demonstrating piety, drawing on the sufferings of Job as a primary example.21 Historians have also begun to explore in greater depth the social position of people with disabilities in the medieval and early modern periods. Although rejecting the crude economic determinism of the historical materialists, this work has also cautioned against assuming a necessary link between disability and poverty. For example, Klaus-Peter Horn and Bianca Frohne have warned against viewing disability through the lens of charity, arguing (like Gleeson) that ‘the semantics of poverty accentuates too emphatically the aspects of marginalization and exclusion’. Instead, they argue, the term ‘disabled poor’ needs more critical usage in historical discourse: does it mean material poverty or lack of power (or both)?22 In his study of narratives of disability found in eighteenth-century English, German, French and American newspapers and periodicals Patrick Schmidt has emphasized the importance of ‘hyphenation’ narratives which, instead of depicting disability as something that marginalized a person, showed how notable individuals might lead meaningful and fulfilling lives after the onset of an impairment, provided that they were ready to accept the limitations imposed by it and adapt their behaviour to their new circumstances.23 Schmidt has also shown how eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals were full of advertisements for medicines that proclaimed their success in ‘curing’ certain impairments or disabling chronic conditions. Such advertisements clearly emphasized the goal of ‘assimilation’ for disabled people—of overcoming their impairments to become integrated into nondisabled society, but the idea that such cures lead to a ‘social inclusion of persons who had been previously marginalized’, he argues, was ‘seldom clearly articulated’.24 The idea that even ‘severe’ congenital impairment was no barrier to success or integration is also to be found in narratives of people exhibited during the long eighteenth century.25 The view of the ‘freak show’ as necessarily exploitative has been challenged in recent studies that have demonstrated the success of certain performers. Accounts of those exhibited simultaneously highlighted their physical oddities whilst emphasizing their conformity with respectable social and moral codes such as ‘a strong work ethic, selfsufficiency, gender propriety and polite behaviour’.26 For example, Matthew Buchinger (1674–1739), who had been born without limbs, achieved wealth and status by exhibiting himself for royalty and at various public and private venues in Britain and Europe. According to the autobiographical sketch that accompanied his self-portrait published in 1724 he stood ‘but 29 Inches high’ and lacked ‘hands, Feet and Thighs’, but this had not prevented him marrying four times, fathering eleven children, and displaying remarkable

44  David M. Turner musical and artistic ability.27 Although accounts of Buchinger and similar ‘armless wonders’ ignored the challenges faced by the congenitally impaired in negotiating the environment and prejudices of eighteenth-century society, congenital impairment was represented not as something that marginalized, but something that was integral to a performer’s success and fame.

II Contexts of Disability and ‘Marginality’ in Early Modern England The relationship between disability and ‘marginality’ was therefore not fixed in the early modern period. However, there were a number of social and cultural contexts in which the ‘marginality’ of people with disabilities became visible. Although it is wrong to assume an inevitable link between disability and poverty, the destitute disabled poor were a visible and threatening presence in the early modern period. There is an abundance of evidence that describes the vagrant disabled poor as staples of the urban environment long before the Victorian period and the advent of the kinds of industrial production that Gleeson and others regard as catastrophic to the status of disabled people. For example, Robert Copland’s Hye-Way to the Spyttell Hous (c. 1536) described a London whose streets teemed with the wandering poor, maimed soldiers and the placeless ‘croked lame and blynde’, in language redolent of the dislocation, marginality and abjection that Gleeson sees as characteristic of disability in modern industrialized capitalism: . . . and in the hye wayes [they] lye At Westminster and at saynt Poules And in all streets they syt as desolate soules.28 The problem of the ‘masterless’ disabled poor on the streets of the metropolis was increasingly remarked upon as the early modern period wore on. Though clearly ‘marginalized’ by their poverty, such beggars were often described as a conspicuous and sometimes threatening presence. Early modern ‘images of the outcast’ in both literature and visual representations, Tom Nichols has argued, often conveyed a ‘challenging ambiguity’, engaging the viewer’s ‘mixed emotions of humour and mistrust, repulsion and attraction, hatred and sympathy’.29 For instance, Elizabethan ‘cony catching’ pamphlets reflected a world in which the urban traveller had to be constantly on guard against the insinuations of street beggars, many of whom claimed (falsely it was suggested) some kind of physical, sensory or mental impairment.30 By the early eighteenth century concerns about the spread of begging in London represented disabled mendicants as ‘unsightly’ marginals, intruding into the centre of urban social and economic life, whose presence threatened the capital’s status as a centre for commercial progress and polite refinement.31 A letter to The Spectator from ‘Hezekiah Thrift’ published in October 1712 complained of the displacement of the ‘Men of

‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’  45 the greatest Consequence’ of the City of London from the Royal Exchange, which had been taken over by the ‘Din of Squalings, Oaths and Cries’ of ‘the Mumpers, the Halt, the Blind, and the Lame’ who begged there.32 It became commonplace for commentators to remark upon the ‘swarms’ of impaired beggars ‘thrusting’ amputee stumps at pedestrians or waving crutches at the doors of coaches in the quest for alms.33 The ‘marginality’ of the displaced poor, disabled or otherwise, was represented as a form of pollution that (in the words of The Spectator’s correspondent) bespoke a lack of ‘domestic care’ for the cleanliness and prosperity of the city.34 Media concerns about vagrancy reflected the importance of work as a social and political value in the early modern period and it is clear that people with impairments were expected (and expected to) work as long as they were able—even into old age.35 The significance of work is evident in the kind of assimilation narratives found in eighteenth-century medical advertising examined by Patrick Schmidt. Whereas Schmidt is right to observe that there is little emphasis on the social exclusion of people with disabilities in the accounts published by quack doctors and their patients revealing the miraculous ‘cure’ of certain ailments, many emphasize the power of medicine in rescuing a person from economic marginality, conceived of in terms of an inability to participate in production. Tradesmen provided testimonies for advertisements that emphasized how they had been rendered ‘incapable of Business’ prior to taking a particular remedy, whereas suppliers described how their products had helped ‘the lame to walk and work, that had been confin’d to their Beds or Crutches for many Years’.36 Such advertisements were imbued with the principles of economic rationality that influenced perceptions and policies towards disability long before the onset of industrialization.37 But the possibilities of avoiding impoverishment and economic marginalization depended not just on the availability of ‘cures’ for particular impairments; they were also affected by the family circumstances of the individual, on ways in which the requirements of different trades or occupations limited participation, and on the local availability of alternative employment for those who were unable to follow their original calling. The welfare provision for those unable to work through sickness or disability enshrined by the Elizabethan Poor Law provides a different context for approaching the ‘marginal’ status of people with disabilities. The categorization of the ‘impotent’ poor in welfare policy found a way of describing the elderly, sick, and disabled poor in a way that combined both economic dependency and powerlessness.38 However, disability was not ‘marginal’ to welfare debate. It was of central importance in determining who should get relief, the nature of that assistance, and provided a focal point for discussion of the social, economic and moral responsibilities of the powerful towards the vulnerable. Assessments for welfare relief predicated the question of need upon economic circumstances, the availability of family support or the presence of dependents, and on certain cultural values that rendered a person more or less ‘deserving’ of assistance.39 But entitlement might be

46  David M. Turner affected by other variables, which fostered divisions in the perception of different types of disabled poor. For example, the nationwide pension scheme for maimed or wounded ex-servicemen administered by local justices of the peace between 1593 and 1679 was established upon the principle that servicemen ought to be eligible for assistance on the basis of their loyal service rather than because of their poverty or state of disablement. In time this was abandoned in favour of a more regulated and discriminatory system where family circumstances and ability to work determined levels of support, thus eroding distinctions between veterans and the rest of the poor.40 Nevertheless, the idea that those disabled in battle were distinct from other people with impairments remained culturally important, as indicated by frequent complaints from eighteenth-century social commentators of impaired beggars feigning stories of military or naval service to make a more convincing case for assistance.41 Whereas all people rendered economically dependent by sickness and disability might be considered ‘marginal’, we need to allow for differences of status within such ‘marginal’ groups based on variables such as authenticity, circumstances of disablement, and moral character. For those unable to support themselves or their families through their own labour, claiming ‘marginality’ could be expedient in their dealings with authority. Letters or petitions written by or on behalf of disabled welfare claimants stressed poverty and economic marginalization, while simultaneously emphasizing their subject’s conformity with mainstream cultural values, often reiterating the past ‘industriousness’ of claimants, their contribution through diligently paying parish rates, and their unwillingness to become a ‘burden’ on others. For example, among the petitions presented to the Middlesex Justices of the Peace in 1698 was an appeal for assistance from John Perry, who had had his ‘left knee disabled’ while serving on HMS Royal Oak. Being ‘not capeable of any livelyhood’ and having a wife and two children to support, he declared that he and they would ‘inevitably Perish unless relieved by this Hon’ble Court’.42 Eighty-year-old Charles Lemat petitioned that he had always taken ‘dilligent care by his Labour’ to provide for his family, but was now unable to do so and placed in ‘great distress’ by reason of his ‘great age and disability of working’.43 Another elderly petitioner, William Platt, emphasized in 1716 that he ‘hath for many years payed all parish taxes and duties’, but now being ‘old and very lame and past his labour and having little or no trade’ was ‘reduced to great straights and necessity’.44 A disabled husband or father might petition for relief on the basis of abject ‘necessity’, while still emphasizing core values such as patriarchal responsibility towards his family ‘dependents’. The discursive power of ‘marginality’, and its situated use by the disabled poor, adds further complexity to our understanding of disability’s relationship to the ‘margins’ of early modern society. Petitions utilized ideas of ‘marginality’ to emphasize the ‘deserving’ status of welfare claimants, but in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the question of the ‘deserving’ status of the disabled poor was further

‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’  47 complicated by the issue of settlement which, following the Poor Relief Act of 1662, determined a person’s eligibility for relief according to their ‘belonging’ to a particular parish.45 Claimants for welfare support under the Old Poor Law on the grounds of sickness or disability seem to have relied mainly on their personal dealings with overseers in their home parishes and on their medical circumstances and histories being well known to the authorities. In contrast, there was much suspicion about the ‘stranger’ poor who were more vulnerable to accusations of imposture and liable to face removal orders to their parish of last settlement.46 Uncertainty regarding settlement could shape perceptions of people disabled under more genuine circumstances. Richard Gough appended to his History of Myddle ‘Certaine Cases and Controversies which Have Happened Between This Parish and Other Parishes’, which included an account of a dispute between the overseers of Myddle and Cardington about the settlement of Humphrey Beddow, ‘a lame man’, that was heard at the Easter Sessions of 1668. Beddow had been born in the parish of Cardington, but had moved to Myddle to find work after serving his apprenticeship as a shoemaker and he married a local woman. Although Beddow claimed settlement in Myddle on account of living there for forty days as a householder, the parish attempted to remove him to his place of birth when he became ill and unable to work and, in Gough’s words, became an ‘idle beggar all his life after’. Cardington parish resisted this attempt to pass the buck for the support of a seriously impaired man and his family and successfully proved Beddow’s settlement in Myddle. ‘This was the first contest that we had and thus wee lost it’, remarked Gough, ‘but thanks be to God wee never lost any afterwards’.47 The material marginality of people with disabilities is more visible in our sources than the isolation or psychological marginalization that could proceed from impairment or debilitating illnesses. The effects of disability on social identity and a person’s sense of self are only just being examined by historians, but cultural anthropology provides some useful methods for conceptualizing the marginality of people with impairments in the past. Stephen J. Milner, examining margins and identity in Italian Renaissance culture, defines the margin as ‘the porous grey area, or buffer zone, in which the integrity and permanency of identities are questioned and contested’.48 Henri-Jacques Stiker has highlighted ways in which the presence of disability in the pre-modern past might heighten fears of the loss of bodily integrity.49 Similarly, Tobin Siebers has argued that ‘disability often comes to stand for the precariousness of the human condition, for the fact that individual human beings are susceptible to change, decline over time and die’.50 In the early modern period, disability challenged the permanency of masculine identity, such as by forcing a man to give up a particular trade or ‘downshift’ to more menial employment, or in the patriarchal household accept a position of greater dependence on his wife or other family members. For example, early modern ballads and satirical prints mocked the diminished patriarchal authority of ‘gouty, lame and old’ husbands whose

48  David M. Turner physical ailments stood for their diminished sexual potency that led to their younger, fitter wives cuckolding them with more virile and ‘able’ lovers.51 Disability also altered a person’s relationship with their spatial surroundings, which could lead to a sense of marginality characterized by loneliness or isolation.52 Whereas in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England there was no ‘great confinement’ of people with disabilities similar to the rise of institutionalization documented by Michel Foucault for France in that period, disablement could be accompanied by a sense of removal even within the home.53 As I have shown elsewhere, many eighteenth-century educated correspondents measured the effects of physical impairment in terms of the degree of ‘confinement’ to which it subjected them.54 Some people might find themselves restricted to a particular room, chair or bed, separated from the rest of their household. Medical advertising in the eighteenth century sought to liberate sufferers from ‘crippling’ diseases from this kind of domestic imprisonment. For example, the advertisement for E. Neeler’s medicines for the rheumatism, gout, or sciatica promised that those ‘that were confined three Parts of the Year to their Rooms, not able to turn themselves in the Bed, or put a Foot to the Ground without crutches, are free from Pains, their Limbs of use to them, their whole Frame of Body easy, their Health and Strength returned, and are able to walk Miles without Cane or Stick’.55 Historians of disability need to pay further attention to these micro-dramas of marginality within homes and communities in order to understand experiences of impairment in the past. A sense of alienation might proceed also from others’ doubts about the veracity of a person’s impairment, or from problems of categorising the impaired within frameworks of health and illness. Irina Metzler has used Victor Turner’s concept of liminality to define the position of men and women with impairments in medieval Europe. One of the key characteristics of disabled people, she argues, is their ‘in-between’ status, occupying an ambiguous territory between sickness and wellness. This ambiguity derived from, and was heightened by, the fluctuating nature of impairments, by differences in the social and economic consequences of certain types of condition and their cultural meanings, and by differing perceptions of visible as opposed to hidden disabilities. Liminality is not the same as exclusion or marginality. For Metzler, liminality is a more useful concept than marginality since physically impaired people often found themselves between normatively fixed positions such as healthy and ill, alive or dead, male or female rather than completely outside traditional structures.56 This ‘in-between’ status was articulated by the eighteenth-century poet Thomas Gray in a letter of 21 August 1755 in which he described the broken sleep, dizziness and fatigue that accompanied his gout: ‘these symptoms are all too slight to make an illness; but they do not make perfect health that is to be sure’.57 The perception of disability not necessarily as ‘marginal’ or outcast, but as ‘in-between’ is useful in allowing for a variety of experiences and for fluctuations in individual circumstances, and cautions us against viewing the

‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’  49 ‘disabled’ anachronistically as a homogeneous group in past societies. As we shall see in the final section of this chapter, the extent to which a condition was disabling, and the ways in which others viewed it, depended on a variety of factors. These included social circumstances, levels of community and family support, and the nature of the local economy; whether impairment allowed a person to earn a living or rendered them entirely dependent on charity; and on the circumstances of disablement in the first place.

III Disability and ‘Marginality’ in Richard Gough’s History of Myddle (c. 1700–1702) The antiquarian Richard Gough’s remarkable account of life in a small rural Shropshire parish at the turn of the eighteenth century provides an interesting case study for examining perceptions of disability in this period, reflecting the impact of disablement on the personal and family fortunes of the parish’s inhabitants over several generations, and providing an insight into how perceptions of disability meshed with other societal concerns and values. When he began writing his account in 1700, Gough was a sixtysix-year-old widower living with his two youngest daughters. According to David Hey, Gough wrote ‘with the voice of the yeoman-freeholder’, and in his account of the families of his parish he frequently championed hardworking, God-fearing conformity.58 The economy of Myddle was based on farming and agricultural labour and Gough’s History provides some glimpses of the rural by-employments that people with impairments might have been able to undertake.59 Anne Parkes, for example, who as a young child contracted rickets which prevented her from walking until the age of nineteen, ‘learnt to knit stockens and gloves, in which imployment shee was very expert and laboriousse’, and enabled her to ‘maintain herselfe after the death of her parents’.60 However, in general impairments are mentioned most often in the context of being unable to work. Gough drew upon some established cultural models in describing the ‘otherness’ of people with disabilities in his text. In the first place, on occasions where the fit merited it, Gough could not resist drawing upon associations between disability and sin. George Reve, whose profligacy was the ‘ruine’ of his whole family, was described as a ‘criple [sic] from his mother’s womb’ having ‘one of his leggs shorter and lesser than the other’ and his behaviour made him living embodiment of the ‘old proverb . . . Beware of him whom God hath marked’.61 Secondly, Gough’s language sometimes located physical difference in a liminal space between human and animal. This is apparent in the depiction of John Aston, who displayed a variety of mental and physical impairments. Gough described him as a ‘person of a deformed countenance and a mis-shapen body; his pace or gate [sic] was directly such as if hee had studied to imitate the peacocke’.62 Nevertheless, although Gough sometimes delighted in commenting upon the oddities of people with non-standard bodies, which ranged from the ‘very crooked’ to

50  David M. Turner the obese, such as his aunt Katherine who was ‘so extreme fatt . . . she could not go straite forward through some of the inward doores in the house’, the more ‘exotic’ manifestations of disability and deformity do not receive much attention in the text.63 Moreover, the association between disability and sin was not inevitable and Gough did not make these connections consistently in his History. The proverbial reference used in the description of George Reve was perhaps more a means of demonstrating the author’s wide range of learning, rather than evidence of a serious commitment to providential interpretations of disability. In another example, he described Samuel Downton as ‘crooke backd’ with a ‘grim swarthy complection and long . . . black haire’, but resisted drawing a causal link between this and his ‘idle and lewd courses’ of living, remarking that ‘hee was not so deformed in Body as debauched in Behaviour’.64 As a parish ratepayer, Gough’s perceptions of disability were coloured more by the economic consequences of disablement than by its spiritual significance. Gough recalled that his grandfather had told him that in the first year he was married (and thus became liable to contribute to the poor rate) in 1633 he paid only four pence a year ‘to the poore’, whereas Gough now paid ‘almost twenty shillings per annum’. Myddle’s only recipient of poor relief in his grandfather’s day was Edward Matthews, ‘a blinde man’ who begged for food while ‘the parish maintained him with cloaths’. Although visually impaired, Gough remarked that Matthews was a ‘strong man, and did wind up the stones for the building of Myddle steeple’, suggesting that his frequent reliance on poor relief and begging could have been a consequence of lack of opportunity to work—or unwillingness of others to employ him—rather than simple incapacity.65 During the second half of the seventeenth century migration into this heretofore settled parish increased, and this may have hardened attitudes towards poverty and disability among the parish’s more well-established inhabitants.66 Gough accepted the duty of the parish to maintain the elderly and those unable to work thanks to physical, sensory, or intellectual impairments, but if disability was deemed to proceed from loose living, or if a person came from a family that strained parochial resources in other ways, then his response was seldom sympathetic. This is most evident in his account of the Bickley family, who were responsible for a number of illegitimate births over several generations. The bastard son of Elizabeth Bickley, noted Gough, ‘fell lame, and had his legge cut off’ which was cured ‘at the parish charge, which cost almost 20 l’. Fitted with a wooden leg, he went to London and returned with a woman whom he ‘says . . . is his wife’, fathering three children with her and living outside the village ‘in the cave in Haremeare Hill’ with ‘maintenance out of the Parish’ poor rates.67 The extreme poverty and marginality of a cavedwelling amputee and his family seemed to make little impression on the sympathies of Gough, whose concerns were more about the financial rather than the human cost of disablement.

‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’  51 Gough’s careful attention to the causes of disablement suggests that circumstantial factors might affect social sympathies towards the impaired. Of William Preece, Gough noted that his lameness proceeded not from his varied military career (which included service in the Low Countries and serving as a sergeant in the county’s trained bands and service in the Royalist army during the civil wars) but from ‘endeavouring to robb Bayley Downton’s hortyard’ whereby he ‘fell downe from a peare tree, and broake his legge, which was every afterwards crooked’.68 In contrast, those with compensatory qualities of character were more deserving, both of sympathy and support. John Groome was described as ‘alwayes a sober man and a painefull labourer; but his wife is now blind, and he is old and indeed an object of charity’.69 Assessment of the ‘deserving’ status of the old or impaired poor in Gough’s account was based on cultural factors as much as it was on simple need. Gough noted that Mary Gittens’s ‘crooked’ body was offset by her ‘modest and religouse’ demeanour and her ‘comely countenance’.70 Gough also viewed disability as a reminder of the body’s mortality. He frequently reflected on the health of the elderly inhabitants of the parish and the afflictions of his own ancestors in old age. His grandfather, also called Richard Gough, was ‘thick of hearing for many yeares before hee dyed, and in his old age was taken with a palsy, and was lame some yeares’. His greatgrandfather had ‘lived to a great age, and was darke [i.e., blind] twenty yeares before he dyed, and yet was very healthfull’.71 In other cases, disability was presented in tragic and vivid terms. The lengthiest account of disability in the History of Myddle concerns Margaret, the wife of Thomas Davies, who died in January 1701. About twenty years previously she had taken cold in child bearing by which ‘she was seized . . . with paine and lamenesse in her limbs, and made use of severall remedyes for cureing thereof, butt all proved ineffectual’. She was touched for the King’s Evil by James II on his progress to Shrewsbury but this, noted Gough, ‘did her noe good’. She was forced to use crutches and during the last ten years of her life ‘grew soe weake that shee was faine to be carried in a person’s armes’, becoming bed-ridden completely for the final two and a half years. There ‘she was so bowed together, that her knees lay cloase to her brest; there was nothing but the skin and bones upon her thighs and leggs’. Both her thigh bones became so brittle that they snapped, and at length she could ‘stir noe part of her body save her head and one of her hands a lytle’. Her body was so contorted that it could not be straightened after she died, so she had to be buried in a specially constructed coffin, and Gough noted that he had heard that when she was placed in it one of her ‘legge bones broke and gave a cracke, like a rotten stick’.72 The case of Margaret Davis presented disability as a personal and family misfortune, but it was also described as a catalyst for charitable intervention that brought out the best in others. ‘It is not to be forgotten’, he recorded, ‘that the Vicar Gittens, seeing that Thomas Davis had a great charge of

52  David M. Turner children and his wife lame upon his hands, did give him his home and garden rent free while hee lived in itt’.73 Care for the elderly and infirm was also seen as an important social duty within families and reinforced the importance of the family as a unit of support that had a legal basis in the 1601 Poor Law.74 Gough noted approvingly how Thomas Morrice ‘who is very aged and blind if not deaf’ was now maintained by his daughter and son-in-law, just as he himself was supported by his daughters.75 Responses to disability were thus an opportunity for individuals and communities to demonstrate their core values, whether by criticising those whose disabilities seemed to proceed from ‘lewd and idle’ courses of living, or in providing opportunities to demonstrate neighbourliness, familial solidarity, or the Christian duty of charity. Through these responses to disability we can see evidence of a symbiotic relationship between the margins and the mainstream in early modern society, responses to the one providing a means of solidifying the values of the other.

IV Conclusion The early modern period has been represented in Disability Studies as a transitional era. On the one hand, people with impairments were marginalized by being stigmatized as ‘monsters’ or mocked as ‘freaks’, and were cast in the role of economic dependents by models of charity encapsulated by the Elizabethan Poor Laws. On the other, the pre-industrial agrarian economy has sometimes been cast as a kind of antediluvian era for people with disabilities, in which they were still able to participate in household production and sell their labour, before succumbing to the economic marginalization associated with industrialization. Yet as this chapter has shown, these assumptions are too simplistic to capture the range of experiences of people with impairments in early modern England. Whilst historical materialist accounts of disability have usefully challenged the belief that the ‘marginalization’ of people with disabilities was unchanging and inevitable, these accounts downplay the potentials for poverty and economic marginalization that could affect people with various impairments in the pre-industrial past and fail to take into account the extent to which discussions of disability were influenced by economic rationality long before the advent of modern industrial capitalism. Although narratives of people achieving success and status in spite of their impairments (such as some eighteenth-century congenitally impaired performers) were well known, the displacement of the vagrant disabled poor was also a common theme. Social commentators were concerned, in particular, with the intrusion of the ‘margins’ into the ‘mainstream’ as accounts of respectable citizens being ‘accosted’ by blind or limbless beggars testified. Yet the needs of the elderly or disabled population were not ‘marginal’ to early modern social policy; they provided what Margaret Pelling has called a ‘kind of acid test’ of social values.76 Charitable giving, whether through private philanthropy, simple acts of kindness, or the

‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’  53 mechanisms of the Poor Law, provided a means of affirming the core values of society through the responsibility to make provision for the ‘impotent’. Historians need to abandon all-encompassing theories of the ‘marginalization’ or ‘inclusion’ of people with impairments in the early modern past and pay more attention to how and in what contexts the rhetoric of marginality was applied to discussions of disability. The biographical sketches of Myddle’s impaired inhabitants by Richard Gough show the importance of a variety of factors that influenced perceptions of impairment. Gough did not necessarily see people with disabilities as a stigmatized ‘other’, but at the same time his sympathies to the ‘plight’ of the impaired were contingent on a number of factors. The distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ was clearly important, not just in establishing claims for assistance, but also in regulating social sympathies towards those whose lives were affected by impairment. But so too was familiarity with a person’s impairments and their ‘belonging’ in a particular locale. Gough’s lengthy description of the dispute between the overseers of Myddle and Cardington over the burden of relieving one ‘lame’ man shows not only how attitudes towards disability could be pragmatic and unsentimental, but also how the question of ‘inclusion’ or ‘exclusion’ for people with disabilities could be based on factors that went beyond impairment itself. Many sources show how people with disabilities attempted to remain economically productive as far a possible and suggest that many saw the economic dependency of poor relief as a last resort. However, records of poor relief also show that ‘marginalization’ could be culturally and socially expedient. The stories of those petitioning the authorities for relief, like those of beggars on the streets, emphasized vulnerability. Adopting a position of ‘marginality’ could be a source of emotional power over others and provided a rhetorical tool for those who had few other resources at their disposal. These stories of ‘marginality’ can tell us much about social life and cultural values in early modern England. The many instances of lives affected by impairment recorded by Richard Gough and others show us that disability was far from a marginal subject to people living in the early modern period.

Notes 1 Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: ‘Soul of a Nation’ (Manchester, 2011); Anne Borsay, ‘Disciplining Disabled Bodies: the Development of Orthopaedic Medicine in Britain, c.1800–1939’ in David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg (eds), Social Histories of Disability and Deformity (London and New York, 2006), pp. 97–116. 2 Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London, 1990). 3 As indicated, for example, in the theme of the 2013 UK Disability History Month: ‘Celebrating our Struggle for Independent Living: No Return to Institutions or Isolation’ http://ukdisabilityhistorymonth.com, accessed 16 December 2013. 4 Sir Robert Jones, ‘Foreword’ in G.R. Girdlestone (ed.), The Care and Cure of Crippled Children (Bristol, 1924), p. 7.

54  David M. Turner 5 Brendan Gleeson, Geographies of Disability (London and New York, 1999), p. 64. 6 B. J. Gleeson, ‘Disability Studies: A Historical Materialist View’, Disability and Society 12 (1997), 191. 7 Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking About Physical Impairment During the High Middle Ages (London, 2006), p. 2; Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, translated by William Sayers (Ann Arbor MI, 2007), p. 66; Roger Cooter, ‘The Disabled Body’ in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London and New York, 2003), pp. 367–83. 8 Iain Hutchison, A History of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (Lewiston NY, 2007), p. 132. 9 Klaus-Peter Horn and Bianca Frohne, ‘On the Fluidity of “Disability” in Medieval and Early Modern Societies: Opportunities and Strategies in a New Field of Research’ in Sebastian Barsch, Anne Klein and Pieter Verstraete (eds), The Imperfect Historian: Disability Histories in Europe (Frankfurt, 2013), p. 35; Sharon N. Barnartt, ‘Disability as a Fluid State: Introduction’ in Sharon N. Barnartt (ed.), Disability as a Fluid State (Bingley, 2010), pp. 1–22. 10 Carol Thomas, Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Issues in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 76. 11 Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, edited by David Hey (Harmondsworth, 1981); David Hey, An English Rural Community: Myddle Under the Tudors and Stuarts (Leicester, 1974); Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982), pp. 39–40. 12 Stiker, History of Disability, pp. 66–9. 13 Colin Barnes, ‘A Legacy of Oppression: A History of Disability in Western Culture’ in Len Barton and Mike Oliver (eds), Disability Studies: Past, Present and Future (Leeds, 1997), pp. 3–24; Judith Hawley, ‘Margins and Monstrosity: Martinus Scriblerus his “Double Mistress” ’, Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998), 31–49. 14 David L. Braddock and Susan L. Parish, ‘An Institutional History of Disability’ in Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman and Michael Bury (eds), Handbook of Disability Studies (Thousand Oaks CA and London, 2001), pp. 11–68. 15 Vic Finkelstein, Attitudes and Disabled People: Issues for Discussion (New York, 1980), pp. 8–11; Gleeson, Geographies of Disability, p. 106; Thomas, Sociologies of Disability and Illness, pp. 53–4. For the economic definition of ‘marginals’ as ‘people the system of labour cannot or will not use’, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton NJ, 1990), p. 53. 16 Gleeson, Geographies of Disability, pp. 96, 99. 17 Anne Borsay, Disability and Social Policy in Britain Since 1750 (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 10–15. 18 Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe, Chapter 3; Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), p. 195. 19 Stefan Heuser, ‘The Human Condition as Seen from the Cross: Luther and Disability’ in Brian Brock and John Swinton (eds), Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (Grand Rapids MI and Cambridge, 2012), p. 188. 20 Deborah Beth Creamer, ‘John Calvin and Disability’ in Brock and Swinton (eds), Disability in the Christian Tradition, p. 223. 21 David M. Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment (New York and London, 2012), p. 38. 22 Horn and Frohne, ‘On the Fluidity of “disability” ’, pp. 21, 39. 23 Patrick Schmidt, ‘No Need for Assimilation? Narratives About Disabled Persons and their Social Integration in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals’ in Barsch, Klein and Verstraete (eds), Imperfect Historian, p. 54. See also Caroline Gray,

‘Not So Deformed in Body as Debauched in Behaviour’  55 ‘Narratives of Disability and the Movement from Deficiency to Difference’, Cultural Sociology 3 (2009), 317–32. 24 Schmidt, ‘No Need for Assimilation?’, p. 53. 25 Ibid., p. 56; Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 94–103. 26 Heather McHold, ‘ “Even as You and I:” Freak Shows and Lay Discourse on Spectacular Deformity’ in Marlene Tromp (ed.), Victorian Freaks: the Social Context of Freakery in Britain (Columbia OH, 2008), p. 26. 27 Portrait of Matthew Buchinger, Bodleian Library John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Human Freaks 2 (48) (1724); Turner, Disability in EighteenthCentury England, pp. 95–9. 28 Robert Copland, The Hye-Way to the Spyttell Hous (London, n.d., [c.1536]), unpaginated. 29 Tom Nichols, ‘Introduction’ in Tom Nichols (ed.), Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe: Picturing the Social Margins (Aldershot, 2007), p. 5. See also Sean Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (Manchester, 2002), pp. 5, 8, 73, 96. 30 Gamini Salgado (ed.), Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets (Harmondsworth, 1972). 31 Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 93–4. 32 The Spectator, edited by Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford, 1965), IV, p. 307 (no. 509, 14 October 1712). 33 Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 93–4; Tim Hitchcock, ‘Begging on the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 478–98. 34 The Spectator, IV, p. 308. 35 Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (Harlow, 1998), pp. 135–54; Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 127–30. 36 For examples see the advertisement for Fitzgerald’s cures, Public Advertiser, 5789 (18 May 1753); letter describing the cures of Mr Ward, Common Sense or the Englishman’s Journal, 165 (29 March 1740). 37 Anne Borsay, ‘Returning Patients to the Community: Disability, Medicine and Economic Rationality before the Industrial Revolution’, Disability and Society 13 (1998), 645–63. 38 Irina Metzler, A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages: Cultural Considerations of Physical Impairment (New York and London, 2013), p. 11. 39 Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c.1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), especially chapter 6. 40 Geoffrey L. Hudson, ‘Disabled Veterans and the State in Early Modern England’ in David A. Gerber (ed.), Disabled Veterans in History (Ann Arbor MI, 2000), pp. 117–44. 41 Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 21, 92. 42 Middlesex Sessions Papers—Justices’ Working Documents January 1698, London Lives 1690 to 1800 (www.londonlives.org, version 1.1, 17 June 2012), LMSMPS500540030, London Metropolitan Archives, Ms. MJ/SP/1698/01, accessed 16 December 2013. 43 Middlesex Sessions Papers—Justices’ Working Documents September 1701, London Lives 1690 to 1800 (www.londonlives.org, version 1.1, 17 June 2012), LMSMPS500810015, London Metropolitan Archives Ms MJ/SP/1709/09, accessed 16 December 2013. 44 Middlesex Sessions Papers—Justices’ Working Documents July 1716, London Lives 1690 to 1800 (www.londonlives.org, version 1.1, 17 June 2012), LMSMPS501540055, London Metropolitan Archives Ms MJ/SP/1716/07, accessed 16 December 2013.

56  David M. Turner 45 K. D. M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge, 2006), Chapter 3; Hindle, On the Parish?, pp. 398–432. 46 For example: letter from ‘Ben Bullivant’ magistrate concerning his treatment of a ‘counterfeit’ disabled beggar, Post Man and the Historical Account 1189 (22 April 1703). 47 Gough, History of Myddle, pp. 251–2. 48 Stephen J. Milner, ‘Identity and the Margins of Italian Renaissance Culture’ in Stephen J. Milner (ed.), At the Margins: Minority Groups in Pre-Modern Italy (Minneapolis MN and London, 2005), p. 4. 49 Stiker, History of Disability, pp. 8, 70. 50 Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor MI, 2008), p. 5. 51 For example, ‘The Cuckold’s Calamity, Or the Old Usurer Plunder’d Out of His Gold by His Young Wife’, Pepys Ballads 5:256 (n.d.), http://ebba.english.ucsb. edu/ballad/22091/image, accessed 16 December 2013; David M. Turner, ‘Disability Humor and the Meanings of Impairment in Early Modern England’ in Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (eds), Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Columbus OH, 2013), p. 63. 52 Robert F. Murphy, The Body Silent (London, 1987), pp. 52, 56. 53 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London, 1965), pp. 35–60. See Borsay, Disability and Social Policy, p. 19. 54 Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England, pp. 109–10. 55 Whitehall Evening Post, or London Intelligencer, 1296 (5 September 1754). 56 Metzler, Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages, pp. 5–7. See also Murphy, Body Silent, p. 112. 57 ‘Thomas Gray to Thomas Wharton, 21 August 1755’, Electronic Enlightenment, edited by Robert MacNamee et al. Vers. 2.1. University of Oxford 2010 http:// www.e-enlightenment.com/item/graythOU0010433_1key001cor, accessed 9 July 2010. 58 Hey, English Rural Community, p. 1 59 Ibid., Chapter 2. 60 Gough, History of Myddle, p. 132. 61 Ibid., p. 128. 62 Ibid., p. 145. 63 Ibid., p. 164, 64 Ibid., p. 197. 65 Ibid., p. 146. 66 Hey, English Rural Community, pp. 41–8 67 Gough, History of Myddle, p. 207. 68 Ibid., p. 134. 69 Ibid., p. 145. 70 Ibid., p. 190. 71 Ibid., pp. 169, 157. 72 Ibid., pp. 235–6. 73 Ibid., p. 236. 74 M.A. Crowther, ‘Family Responsibility and State Responsibility in Britain Before the Welfare State’, Historical Journal 25 (1982), 131–45. 75 Gough, History of Myddle, p. 237. 76 Pelling, Common Lot, p. 134.

Part II

The Law

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4 Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice1 Sara M. Butler

During Trinity term 1474, Humfrey Starkey, an eager apprentice in the court of Exchequer Chamber, an appellate court for civil actions under the common law, turned to the royal justices present that day and posed an intriguing question. He asked: ‘if an action is brought against a woman who is neither maid, widow, nor wife, what should she have as an addition?’ Here, Humfrey was employing the language of the 1413 Statute of Additions that required indictments to identify defendants by name, locality, and estate, which for a woman meant marital status. Humfrey’s query is phrased almost as a riddle; the difficulty encountered by these learned justices in answering Humfrey’s question confirms that they also regarded it as a somewhat discomfiting puzzle. Some justices replied that she would be called ‘singlewoman’, others responded by saying ‘servant’, and still others were worried that ‘servant’ was insufficient as an addition by common law, and thus were uncertain what to call her.2 For the historian, what is most disconcerting is that this perplexing exchange over how to classify an unmarried grown woman was thought to be so instructive that it was included in the Year Books. These annual publications were essentially textbooks, recording actual cases and courtroom dialogues with the intention of illustrating good legal reasoning ‘for the learning of future generations’ of aspiring pleaders and justices.3 The categorization of women into a maid/wife/widow scheme, popular in both legal treatises and sermon literature, was a deliberate construct with very meaningful consequences.4 This interpretative scheme presumes the centrality of marriage to a woman’s life experience and identity. Academic law encourages the perception that all women, if not gladly, embraced this categorization. The pages of the Year Books are filled with the erudite banter of pleaders and justices jockeying for intellectual superiority in the courtroom, constantly playing a legal version of the game ‘What if?’ in order to shed light on the errors of their peers’ conclusions. In this game, they treat the singlewoman as a mythical figure. When discussion turns to singlewomen, they fulfil three specific goals. First, singlewomen are used in a comparative sense to explain the role of coverture, in particular to illustrate when a married woman has overstepped her bounds by acting outside the

60  Sara M. Butler presence of her husband or without his consent.5 Tied to this example is a second goal: to denote those acceptable circumstances in which a married woman acts independently, usually with respect to purchasing or selling goods or lands in pursuit of her own business needs. In this case, she is acting as a single woman, that is, a feme sole.6 The only time the Year Books address singlewomen as a real entity is in the third example: when justices wish to understand the burdens placed on husbands by underscoring how they take on responsibility for the debts and misdemeanours committed by their wives before marriage.7 In the end, these discussions are really about the rights and responsibilities of spouses, not singlewomen. The Year Books leave the historian with the distinct impression that English justices would not recognize a singlewoman if she walked into their courtroom without a married woman by her side to provide a meaningful comparison. Nonetheless, courtroom dialogues, such as those recorded in the Year Books, help to illuminate the obstacles facing historians in their investigation into the role and status of singlewomen in medieval England. The ‘invisibility’ of singlewomen involves two distinct problems.8 First, singlewomen are often invisible to historians. While legal and administrative documentation easily masks the role played by most women in medieval society, the predilection of medieval documents to describe women by their relationships to men complicates the situation. As a result, singlewomen are not always readily identifiable; unless some indication of age is included in a document, many singlewomen are easily confused with underage daughters. The performative nature of singleness also complicates identification: it is sometimes hard to discern the single from the married feme sole. Second, Humfrey’s sincere bewilderment as well as the suspect treatment of singlewomen in the Year Books more generally confirms that medieval singlewomen also elude historians because the world in which they lived did not acknowledge their existence. The challenges in classifying singlewomen might lead some historians to conclude that singlewomen were rare in late medieval England. Demographic findings undermine this perception. Poll tax evidence drawn from the late fourteenth century indicates, ‘roughly 30 percent of all women aged 14 or older were single’, and these figures specifically single out the nevermarried from the ever-married (widows).9 With such a substantial percentage of women who were single, how is it possible that they did not warrant a ‘room of their own’ in the medieval system of classification? Is it possible that singlewomen were as invisible in life as they were in the Year Books? The records of litigation, as opposed to legal commentaries, help to retrieve that lived experience to understand how singlewomen fit into medieval communities. The need to uncover the lived reality of actual, as opposed to theoretical, singlewomen is affirmed by the scope of current historical research. To date, the study of singlewomen in medieval England (as opposed to the broader European evidence) has been largely theoretical.10 Cordelia Beattie stands as the leader in this field. Not only is her book,

Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice  61 Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England, the only monograph-length study of the subject, she draws on an impressive array of highly diverse materials in order to examine ideas about singlewomen in penitential discourse, fiscal discourse (for example, poll tax returns), guild texts, and civic records. Remarkably, she concludes that despite the failure of singlewomen to buy fully into the maid/wife/widow ideal, the medieval English, at least rhetorically, valued the contributions of singlewomen: the more traditional classification of women ‘co-existed, interacted and competed with alternative models which also recognized women’s occupational and economic statuses as important’.11 Moreover, Amy Erickson’s recent work argues that English singlewomen were less marginalized than singlewomen in Continental Europe.12 Where European kingdoms regularly saddled singlewomen with guardians to care for their financial and legal affairs, ‘England was unique in considering unmarried adult women . . . as legal individuals’. As a result, in England ‘single women had more resources at their disposal than elsewhere in Europe’.13 This perspective is somewhat rosier than most would have imagined; yet, the theoretical basis needs to be grounded more closely in a reality. The purpose of this chapter is to start looking to that reality. This chapter will draw primarily on a sampling of records from the fifteenth-century Court of Common Pleas (better known as the Common Bench), as well as some fifteenth-century Court of Chancery petitions. Common Bench was the central court for civil dispute resolution in medieval England—each roll includes at least five times as many entries as those of King’s Bench.14 By the fifteenth century, the court had achieved such popularity that its records offer the best possible insight into a cross-section of English society. While still weighted more heavily towards the elite, its litigants were sometimes ‘no more than members of the peasantry, of no importance outside their own locality’.15 Chancery petitions, which emanated from roughly the same grouping of individuals as Common Bench, were more detailed in nature and are thus useful to illustrate some of the larger issues that this chapter addresses.16 This chapter hopes to shed light on how singlewomen survived in a world that failed to acknowledge their existence. English singlewomen experienced marginality chiefly in terms of an absence of conceptual space rather than a geographic divide. However, while their invisibility allowed them to participate unnoticed in most aspects of ordinary life, it presented a very real obstacle when a singlewoman experienced injustice and hoped to find remedy in a court of law. Only when accompanied by a man did a singlewoman find herself suddenly visible to royal justices.

I Defining Singlewomen in the Medieval Courts The marginality of singlewomen is evidenced best in the difficulty of finding them in the records of the medieval courts. While the term singlewoman as a personal designation dates as far back as the year 1303, the legal record did

62  Sara M. Butler not popularly employ the term until the fifteenth century.17 Other vocabulary such as ‘unmarried’ (soluta), a woman ‘alone’ (sola) and feme sole are also significant (but not always definitive) in signalling a woman’s unmarried state. Close consideration of the male by which the record identifies a woman is also pertinent. A grown woman described as ‘daughter of . . .’ or ‘servant of . . .’ is most likely a singlewoman, as are those women who the records identify primarily by profession (where there is no additional information to contradict their single status). The parameters of this study are complicated additionally by the discursive confusion surrounding singlewomen. While our royal justices had much difficulty discriminating between singlewomen and servants, still others lumped together singlewomen and prostitutes. For example, London’s regulation of the Southwark brothels used the term ‘single woman’ consistently in place of ‘prostitute’.18 In trying to make sense of the interchangeability of the two seemingly disparate terms, the point of association lies in the inability to categorize either woman to her relationship with a man. ‘Prostitute’ and ‘singlewoman’ became transposable terms because of ‘the absence of a husband to answer for her and fix her place in society and in a household’.19 Nevertheless, this practice reminds us that singlewomen existed also on the margins of morality: without a husband to govern her behaviour, a singlewoman became the quintessential ‘public woman’, (that is, a prostitute). Singlewomen were also marginalized within the category of unmarried women. Because a widow could lay claim to an elevated position in the social hierarchy in contrast to a singlewoman, some widows insisted on recognition of their social achievement. Thus, a complaint recorded by the borough of Nottingham made by Elizabeth Spenser, ‘single woman’, against Emma Spenser, ‘widow’ in 1495–96 for withholding household goods is instructive precisely because it makes this key distinction between the ‘evermarried’ and the ‘never-married’.20 Yet, male scribes were not consistent in recognizing this feminine hierarchy.21 Once again, the Year Books shed some light on this subject: the courtroom dialogues surrounding a 1421 dispute recorded in the plea rolls discusses what it meant to be a singlewoman. Serjeant Hals explains that a woman can become a feme sole ‘by death of her husband, or by divorce’, clarifying that the medieval world did not seem to consider perpetual singleness as a possibility.22

II The Single Life in Late Medieval England Because of the expenses associated with being self-sufficient, as well as the moral discomfort with the notion of a singlewoman living on her own, communal living has generally been assumed to have been the lot of medieval singlewomen. England’s late medieval workforce supported a breadwinner ideology, paying women workers an average of roughly 71 per cent of the wages of a man.23 Moreover, domestic labour, which has traditionally been understood as an extension of the labour that best belongs to a women’s

Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice  63 expertise, ‘seldom produced enough money to support a family, offering only supplemental incomes’.24 The economic data corroborates the supposition that few women could live comfortably on their own. Continental histories underscore the role played by family in terms of communal living, documenting singlewomen sharing homes with mothers, other single sisters, or living in the household of a married sibling.25 The evidence of the English courts, however, establishes that living with one’s family was not a popular option for singlewomen. In reality, English singlewomen leaned towards independent living. Some singlewomen entered into leasing agreements to occupy property for a limited term. In 1464, Joan Isbury leased a messuage with appurtenances in London in the parish of St Margaret Lothbury for two years. Her annual rent was seven marks, payable at Easter and Michaelmas in equal portions.26 This case wound up in court when she failed to pay £9 6s 8d of outstanding rent. Her landlord, Richard Turnaunt, sued his plaint against both Isbury and her new husband in 1468, requesting ten marks (£6 13s 4d)27 in damages.28 Emma Stanys also chose to live independently while single. In March of 1497, she leased one messuage of land with appurtenances in Ware, Hertfordshire, for three years. The annual rent was ten marks (£6 13s 4d), similarly to be paid in equal portions at Easter and Michaelmas. After failing to pay the final year’s rent, her landlord also took her and her new husband to court at Easter term in 1500, requesting damages of five pounds (100s).29 Both Joan Isbury and Emma Stanys were urban singlewomen; their stories represent the potential an urban singlewoman had for an independent lifestyle. Despite the prominence of primogeniture, the inhabitants of English towns were partial to partible inheritance: burgesses tended to grant their daughters cash marriage portions with amounts varying from five to one hundred marks.30 Kate Staples’s survey of London wills observes that parents habitually left money for their daughters of roughly ten pounds or more.31 In fact, Staples concludes that ‘parents provided equally for their children. It is clear from the wills that these parents aimed to equip their daughters for economic success and to provide them with financial security, as they did for their brothers’.32 Marriage portions and bequests offered urban singlewomen expanded opportunities for financial autonomy. Although many heiresses were swiftly snatched up by enthusiastic suitors, the examples of Joan and Emma reveal that some lived autonomously off their inheritances before marrying. The self-sufficiency that Joan and Emma pursued was beyond the reach of many singlewomen. In this respect, independent living existed on a spectrum. Where Joan and Emma represent the most advantageous experience, more commonly medieval singlewomen achieved autonomy by boarding with individuals or families, in much the same way many English bachelors lived. The relationship of a boarder to the household in which she lived fluctuated: at the very least, boarding entitled a woman to a bed and a seat at the family table; boarding might also lead to substantially more

64  Sara M. Butler independence, with a furnished room and the use of cooking equipment.33 The court records rarely specify precisely what the arrangement in question entailed. Nonetheless, both ends of the boarding spectrum supplied a singlewoman with far more self-sufficiency than residing in the home of a member of her natal family. A late fifteenth-century chancery petition by John Ropkyns, a waxchandler who claimed to have been at the mercy of a well-connected singlewoman boarder, shines some light on the boarding process. When Elizabeth Blount came to live in John’s home, a vintner named Christopher Goswell (relationship unknown), negotiated the costs and sealed the agreement, even though it was plainly Elizabeth’s responsibility to pay her own boarding expenses. Given the cross-gendered nature of the living situation, propriety alone may have necessitated that Elizabeth have someone speak on her behalf in order to guarantee that her intentions (and her new landlord’s) were respectable. Elizabeth agreed to pay John 16d weekly. While she paid eight of the 24s she owed at her departure after eighteen weeks, the remaining 16s exceeded her available funds. As a result, she presented John with a ‘harnessed girdle’ as security for the residual. Since then, relations had soured: John and her protector were fighting over possession of the girdle, and Christopher had encouraged Elizabeth to plead a suit of trespass against her landlord, presumably for theft of the girdle. Fearing Christopher’s strong communal standing might undo him in the local court, John turned to the chancellor for help.34 John’s bill enumerates in detail the various facets of the role played by Christopher in both the initial arrangements and the ensuing dispute. The rationale for this is plain enough: if Elizabeth was too poor to pay her rent, shouldn’t Christopher be answerable as her protector? This is just one example of the contradictory approach adopted by the common law towards women: while common law envisioned singlewomen having much the same rights and responsibilities as men, in courtroom practice litigants preferred to adopt a guardianship model. Landlords knew they were more likely to reclaim lost monies if they could target also a male to shoulder the burden of responsibility. For example, John York’s suit against Joan Parker in the 1429 Common Bench for unpaid rent was sued at the optimal time; she had only just gotten married. Much to the chagrin of many new husbands, the common law held husbands responsible for all their wives’ previous debts. Even though it had been seven years since she defaulted on a year’s worth of rent, adding up to £3 13s 4d, her newly married state ignited York’s hope of finally being repaid.35 Reliable access to cash hindered singlewomen like Elizabeth Blount and Joan Parker from paying their boarding expenses. This problem was not exclusive to singlewomen: rather, medieval England’s economy functioned chiefly on credit. In the business world, merchants financed up to 75 per cent of their transactions through credit.36 The ubiquity of deferred payments for goods and wages evolved into an elaborate system of credit that involved

Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice  65 ‘most people within the community’.37 This is especially true during the bullion famine of the fifteenth century, which led to an acute shortage of coinage in small denominations.38 The English chose alternate means of engaging in a consumption economy: bartering goods, services and labour; buying on instalments; cancelling debts with other debts. While all Europe experienced the same crisis, credit relations in England stand out because they were primarily oral. Written instruments for loans did exist: when the value involved was substantial, a written obligation, sealed and signed by both parties provided obvious security.39 Some individuals had their agreements formally enrolled before the local court; a recognizance of this nature produced numerous written evidences for reference, as both parties received certificates (copies) of the agreement. Most importantly, there were no social restrictions on who might make use of such written instruments; indeed, ‘all classes of society’ resorted to written obligations and recognizances at one time or another, usually when the risk was ‘higher than normal’.40 However, the prevalence of loans coupled with the inconvenience of the written instruments meant that most Englishmen and women preferred oral contracts. In a predominantly cashless society, singlewomen adopted creative approaches to funding their boarding contracts. Some singlewomen guaranteed lease payments by ceding control of properties to their landlords. The late fifteenth-century complaint of Harry Sayvell and his wife Cecily explains that when Cecily was single she lodged with William Boleyn of Boston for two years. During that time, William reportedly ‘had in his possession lands and tenements of the said Cecily to the value of ten marks’ (£6 13s 4d) annually. As remuneration for Cecily’s board, he received all profits and revenues. However, Cecily discovered the hard way that oral agreements offer little security for the debtor. Soon after her marriage to Harry Sayvell, William affirmed an action of debt against the two in the court of piepowder, claiming ten pounds in unpaid rent (even though Cecily claimed ‘she owed him no penny for her board’). Fearing imprisonment, the Sayvells begged the chancellor to intervene.41 Not all singlewomen were as trusting as Cecily Sayvell. When William Cros and his wife Alice provided Petronilla of Hereford with a ‘suitable chamber’ and maintenance in London for the year of 1310–11, they entered into a deed of covenant recorded before the mayor and chamberlain of London. Petronilla delivered to William and Alice forty marks (£26 13s 4d) to keep for her in trust; the deed permitted the Cros couple to trade twenty marks (£13 6s 8d) of the total sum, rendering half the profits to Petronilla. Beyond that, Petronilla consented to pay fifty shillings (£2 10s) for her board. The formality of the agreement stood Petronilla in a much stronger position: at the end of the term, she appeared before the chamberlain to acknowledge satisfaction for twenty pounds out of the forty marks (£26 13s 4d) owed and she appointed an attorney to receive the remainder.42 On the lower end of the independence spectrum exist those singlewomen who engaged in service, living and working for a master (and often his

66  Sara M. Butler family). This was a popular option, especially for unskilled or poor women who hoped to amass a dowry before entering the marriage market.43 Financially, however, the nature of payment schedules jeopardized a singlewoman’s continued independence. Service contracts worked on an annual basis and were (again) oral in nature; each Martinmas, servants and their masters renegotiated their contracts, and numerous disgruntled servants moved on to greener pastures. Masters did not relinquish a servant’s wages until the end of that contract. The purpose of deferring payment was to protect the employer’s end of the bargain. Yet, it also provided a safeguard of sorts for the servants: the annual character of service contracts prevented most women from long-term exploitation by a crook. In those situations where a singlewoman entered into a contract extending beyond a year, her employers still paid wages in a lump sum at the end of the contractual period, leaving lots of room for abuse. For instance, when John Lee engaged a singlewoman named Agnes to work for him as a spinster for six years (1433 to 1439), he promised her annual wages of one pound (20s), plus 10s 4d for a gown. During Trinity term 1445, before Common Bench, Agnes maintained that he had paid her none of the £6 10s 4d owed for her service. Although six years had passed since her contract terminated, now that Agnes was married she was finally prepared to sue her former employer for the monies outstanding.44 Some singlewomen negotiated contracts with more frequent pay periods specifically to avoid the possibility of working for free. When Alice Freman signed on to work for Richard Hethe in August of 1442 as his pantrymaid and butler for a term of five years, she agreed to do so on condition he pay her an annual salary of 13s 4d, due in equal portions at the ‘four usual feasts’. Granted, the lawsuit she pleaded against his executors for arrears of five marks (£3 6s 8d) at Easter term in 1466 (nearly nineteen years after the completion of her contract) implies that she was ineffective in forcing her employer to adhere to the special conditions.45 Some servants were not hesitant to stand up for their rights: when Matilda Bailly left the service of Thomas Chirche in 1429, her explanation for why she left differed tremendously from that of her master. Thomas declared she did so ‘without reasonable cause or licence, in contempt of the king, against the form of the statute’, and to his damage (ten marks, or £6 13s 4d). Her response was that she served him faithfully until the feast of the Purification in the year 1429. At that point, she requested that he start providing ‘good and sufficient food’, as her contract stipulated; when he refused to do so, she withdrew from his service.46 A servant was well within her rights to pull out of a contract if meals and clothing promised in the original agreement were not forthcoming; these were not perquisites of the job, they were part of her salary. Matilda Bailly’s decision reveals that she was aware of her rights and was not afraid to exercise them.47 Ensuring payment of wages, foodstuffs, or garments was just one of the problems engendered by the financial relationship that existed between master and servant. Delayed wages led to a woman’s employer acting as her

Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice  67 financial manager, technically assuming the role of her ‘receiver’—that is, the administrator of her properties and monies for the duration of the contract. With the wrong receiver, this relationship produced a whole host of abuses. A singlewoman’s vulnerability, in this respect, was laid bare in those occasions where she received a bequest from a family member or former employer while working as a servant. The 1465 complaint of Edith, wife of Richard Donyngton, highlights the risks. As a singlewoman she worked for Thomas Brydon of Suffolkshire for one year. During that time, Brydon received eighty marks (£53 6s 8d) of her money into his account from what would seem to be a bequest. While he was obliged to render this money to Edith upon request, in the thirteen years since that time, both before and after her marriage, he had failed to do so. Because of the length of the dispute and the interest that would have accumulated, Edith and her husband were requesting one hundred pounds in damages.48 Edith’s complaint was not unusual. Among others, Ellen Horde in 1460 lodged a similar complaint against her former employer, London goldsmith Matthew Philip; Isabel Elsyngham also sued her former master, London clerk William Ryng, in 1426 for monies withheld as a receiver.49 The grievances filed by these former servants are edifying not only in drawing attention to the exploitation of the power relationship inherent in service contracts, thus endangering a singlewoman’s ability to remain single, but in demonstrating that women preferred to pursue these lawsuits with the benefit of a male protector. All eight of the women from our sampling of plea rolls who appeared in court to accuse their previous employers of embezzling their funds did so only after they had married and could sue jointly with their husbands.

III Participating in a Credit Economy These examples emphasize the centrality of credit to a singlewoman’s independence. In the medieval context, a person’s creditworthiness was tied closely to personal standing; a family’s access to necessities was then defined by the collective reputation of its individual members.50 For men, honesty and plain dealing shaped their social credit; for women, their sexual reputations mattered most.51 Given that municipal law often equated singlewomen with prostitutes, using the terms interchangeably, easy access to credit should have been beyond a singlewoman’s reach. To complicate the situation further, creditor-debtor associations existed primarily along horizontal, not vertical lines—that is, ‘lenders trusted people like themselves’.52 In this environment, singlewomen should have faced substantial roadblocks in convincing creditors to loan them cash, or even in purchasing goods with the agreement to pay at a later date. Remarkably, the legal record suggests the reverse. Singlewomen relied heavily on credit. Of the 119 cases involving singlewomen drawn from a sampling of plea rolls, forty-two of them (that is, 35 per cent) involved women prosecuted for failing to repay debts incurred while single. Certainly,

68  Sara M. Butler the actual percentage of fifteenth-century singlewomen who borrowed money or bought on credit in medieval England was much higher. Not only does this figure derive from a mere sampling of cases, but debt litigation was sued in a multitude of venues. King’s Bench, in particular, rivalled Common Bench in popularity for debt litigation. Plaints revolving around small-scale inter-peasant credit relationships might appear also in local or municipal courts for resolution; even seigneurial courts and the church courts sometimes addressed debt proceedings.53 Moreover, this array of courts considers only cases of failed credit relations; presumably, most borrowers paid back their debts. What is significant about these particular cases drawn from the plea rolls is the pattern of litigation they reveal. In each case, the creditor waited until the woman was financially stable before suing—that is, he waited until she married, even if that wait took as long as six years, nine years, or even seventeen years.54 The patience exhibited by creditors was pragmatic; even royal justices cannot wring water from a stone. Many others turned to extralegal arbitration to develop payment plans, working on the premise that partial repayment is better than none. The legal record reinforces this perception. Plaintiffs sometimes initiated a plea in court chiefly ‘to spur defendants into agreeing to a licence of concord’.55 Pleading at Common Bench frequently included requests for ‘licences to imparl’, meaning a desire to seek amicable settlement outside of court. For example, in the 1429 suit between Walter Scarlet and Emma Clarenceux, Walter recounted how the two had such a long history of ‘trespasses, debts and quarrels’ that they had agreed to submit to arbitration. The arbitrators determined that Emma ought to pay Walter 106s 8d (or £5 6s 8d) in amends. However, Emma did not keep up her end of the bargain, and Walter was now resolved to sue her and her new husband, John Mynne, for the sum projected by the arbitrators.56 The participation of singlewomen in a credit economy defies traditional scholarly assumptions that the financial vulnerability of singlewomen propelled them into marriage. These forty-two cases of debt litigation construct an entirely different picture. These are not desperate loans to cover basic expenditures. The records of unpaid purchases, in particular, reveal that these were business investments.57 Many singlewomen were clearly working in the textile industries: Agnes Wykeham defaulted on a payment for six yards of white woollen cloth.58 Elizabeth Bate owed 40s (£2) for six ells of black cloth called ‘black of lyre’ (that is, cloth woven in Lierre, Brabant) and four ells of musterdevillers (cloth woven at Montivilliers in Normandy).59 Margaret Bebgrove failed to pay 40s (£2) for one fur of greywork (cloth pieced together from furs).60 The allegations lodged against Elizabeth, later wife of Peter Hous, produce the most obvious example of a businesswoman’s inventory. She was indebted for 160 hides of grey, thirty hides called ‘rygges’61 of grey, forty-two hides of budge, ten black lamb hides; three hundred miniver skins, fifty-seven ermine skins, seven marten skins and three skins of white leather.62 Other singlewomen worked in victuals: Margaret

Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice  69 Spense paid only 26s 8d of the £8 owed for one tun of wine called ‘osey’ (most likely sweet wine from the Lisbon area).63 Matilda Rynere never paid for 60s (£3) worth of salt fish and fresh fish.64 Emma, later to be wife of William Wymmeswold, a spicer, was presumably already working in the same field as her future husband while single; she owed the widow of the grocer money for 24 lbs of currants, 2 lbs of wormseed, 2 lbs of cloves, ½ lb of mace, 6 lbs of dates, and a bale of madder.65 Surely, this was not all for personal use. For those debts appearing in the records as simple cash advances, once again, the amounts involved point to business ventures. Only six of the forty-two cases of debt were for sums under £10. All other debts were largescale. To offer a few examples: Elizabeth Bramspath borrowed £40 from William Preston.66 The record does not tell us the original amount that Joan Bray borrowed, but in an accounting she was found to be £40 in arrears in repaying her debts to John Stokton.67 Margaret Hyde and Matilda Sherley both borrowed £20.68 Matilda Kendale borrowed £60.69 Some women entered into multiple bonds (and apparently defaulted on all of them): Joan SeintJohn and William Ryder (her business partner) entered into three bonds with John Godston, two each for 53s 4d, and the final one for five marks (in total, £8 13s 4d).70 Joan Walker entered into two bonds with William Betley for 56s 8d each (in total, £5 13s 4d).71 The sizes of these loans challenge the image of singlewomen just barely making it by. Indeed, they contest scholarly perceptions of women borrowers entirely: William Jordan argues that ‘women tended to be small-borrowers—borrowers for livelihood, for food, for the necessities of home’.72 These singlewomen were active participants in credit relationships because they were businesswomen investing in wares for resale or production. Admittedly, as business investments, the debts of these particular singlewomen fall short of the more typical investments of male merchants recorded in the Statute Merchant Roll of Coventry for the same period. The average amounts of credit recorded in those rolls for the merchant class were: for 1392–99, £55; for 1400–09, £37; and for 1410– 16, £61.73 Yet, even if these women were involved in small business loans, they were still businesswomen nonetheless. Sometimes singlewomen were on the other end of the equation: lending money as opposed to borrowing it. This was a pragmatic decision; money lending was an easy means of investing cash with minimal risks. Other investment options, such as buying cattle or arable land, were either precarious or labour-intensive. The sampling of fifteenth-century plea rolls provides evidence of sixteen singlewomen who initiated suits in the hopes of seeing their loans repaid. The size of loans reported in the lawsuits varied greatly. Many women were involved in petty money lending: for example, in the year 1399, Alice, later wife of William Wellys, advanced Thomas Driffeld £4 8s 9d. By 1402 he had still not repaid his loan; she and her new husband were claiming damages of 100s (or £5).74 In 1427, Joan, later the wife of Stephen Collee, loaned 40s (£2) to Richard Frome,

70  Sara M. Butler a skinner living in Kent. Two years later, she and her new husband claimed £10 in damages.75 Some loans were sizeable: in January 1425 Beatrice Fulthorp entered into a bond with Thomas Tudenham of Knight Oxborough for £120 payable by Christmas of the same year. She and her new husband took him to court three years later for defaulting on the loan, claiming £200 in damages.76 In the year 1462, Joan Walker entered into two separate bonds with William Betley, a gentleman of Coventry, both for 56s 8d (in total, £5 13s 4d). After he defaulted, she and Thomas Northlond, her new husband pleaded a suit of debt against him, requesting 40s (£2) in damages. The record for this case actually offers a conclusion: the jury ordered the plaintiffs recover their debt and damages and assigned a further 6s 8d to cover legal costs.77 The size of these loans tells us much about their purpose: once again, these were not loans for personal consumption, but rather investments.78 Where we see singlewomen at their most vulnerable financially speaking is in those credit relationships that extend beyond cash exchanges. Singlewomen seem to have made especial usage of the process of safekeeping, for example. Without banks or safety deposit boxes, singlewomen with movables or an inheritance frequently entered into credit relationships with others they deemed trustworthy in order to safeguard those goods or monies.79 Seven singlewomen from the fifteenth-century sampling were involved in disputes that recognizably emerged out of situations of safekeeping. The nature of the goods disputed offer insight into their purpose. Some singlewomen entered into arrangements to care for family heirlooms: Margery Southcote delivered a gold rosary and a gold necklace, purportedly worth twelve marks, into the hands of Joan Bodham for safekeeping.80 Others used this arrangement to protect ownership of landed properties: Emma Neuton appeared in court in the hopes of retrieving ‘a certain bag containing charter writings and other muniments’ that she had delivered into the hands of Agnes Brydon.81 Some of the goods are commercial in nature, equipment and wares, most likely inherited from a former master or family members: Joan Sergeant, for example, claimed that Thomas and Joan Hynstoke unjustly detained chattels worth 100s (£5) that she had given to them for safekeeping while single. The goods in question were: one pair of jugs containing sixteen gallons, one pair of jugs called ‘stage bottles’ containing four gallons, one pair of jugs containing ten gallons, twenty forms, and two forms called ‘collock forms’. Joan was clearly preparing for a life as a bottlemaker, even before she married her bottlemaker husband.82 It is likely that the vast majority of these goods were inherited; Kate Staples notes that it was common for daughters to inherit moveables.83 In some cases, the credit relationship soured only because the individual in possession of the goods had died. Both Margery Southcote and Emma Neuton, for example, were fighting with executors who refused to recognize the existence of any oral contract. Singlewomen were at least well aware of their rights. Margaret Smale recounts how she had goods and chattels (mostly jewellery) worth

Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice  71 £10 stolen from her while she was a guest at an inn. She cited ‘law and custom of the land’ to remind the court that an innkeeper was responsible for the safekeeping of his guests’ goods.84 Pawning was probably also a popular option among singlewomen. Pawning is the practice of giving goods to a broker as surety for repayment of a loan. The loan is generally of lesser value than the value of the pawned goods. Once the loan is repaid with interest, the goods are returned. Marjorie McIntosh has argued that ‘[p]awning might be the only means whereby people could get cash if they had a poor reputation for credit worthiness, no relatives or friends willing or financially able to sign a bond with them, and/ or no landed property to use as collateral for a loan’.85 William Jordan also associates pawnbroking primarily with vagabonds and marginals.86 This form of moneylending would seem to have been ideal for the urban singlewoman of precarious means. Regrettably, the court records themselves do not offer much insight into this experience; the nature of the agreement and its principals probably best explains the paucity of records. Individuals who pawned their goods because they had no better means of getting a loan would not have been able to scrape together the money needed to plead a suit at Common Bench. Those cases that did make their way into court more often than not probably appeared as cases of theft. For example, Katherine Welles appeared at Common Bench in 1424 to accuse William and Joan Wright of ‘forcibly’ taking goods from her to the value of 100s (£5). The goods in question were ½ lb of ‘raw silk’, a brass bowl and other household utensils. William and Joan Wright denied that they had committed any trespass. Rather, they explained that Katherine had willingly delivered the silk to them as surety for a loan.87 A convoluted story of master-servant relations gone awry from a chancery petition emphasizes that pawning was indeed a last resort. Joanne Norman’s bill of complaint accused her master Thomas Swynley, a London tailor, of colluding with the hosteller, John Haliday to indict her falsely for theft. ‘By the maintenance’ of Thomas Swynley, Haliday took an action of trespass against Joanne at the sheriff’s court, asserting that she had broken into his chest and stolen goods worth 40s (£2). With no other option, she turned to her master, Thomas Swynley, and begged him to be her surety. Having only a horned girdle worth 11s to her name, she pawned the girdle to her master ‘in great trust that he should defend her in her right according to the law’. While Swynley succeeded in getting Joanne delivered from prison, he had since given her an ultimatum: either she worked for him ‘at his will for little or nothing’, or he would return her to prison. At this point, Joanne requested the aid of the chancellor in her predicament.88 Joanne’s self-portrait to the chancellor probably best describes singlewomen of her ilk: she is ‘a singlewoman living in poverty and by great labour and is desolate of friends and having none aid, help nor comfort nor other goods where with to greet her counsel nor pay the fees of the court’. Certainly, singlewomen in this situation were not going to be able to sue anyone.

72  Sara M. Butler Women debtors, like Joanne Norman above, appearing in this sampling of records present a very different perception of women’s credit relationships than we have come to expect. William Jordan’s seminal work on women and credit emphasizes that women borrowed from other women. Looking at the European evidence broadly he stresses the ‘women-to-women networks of buying and selling and of lending and borrowing’.89 He contends that this was true also in pawning relationships: women ‘preferred to go to a female pawnbroker to avoid suspicions of having compromised her sexual virtue or because women specialized in handling ‘female’ articles like kerchiefs and aprons’.90 Yet, gender was not a dividing factor in the world of credit as illuminated in the plea rolls. Female debtors invariably borrowed from male creditors, women who failed to pay for their purchases owed money to male merchants, and female creditors who loaned money advanced it to male borrowers. The only exception to the rule is one case of safekeeping: in the year 1414 Katherine Palmer, a singlewoman, delivered to Ellen Boteler, then also a singlewoman, various goods for safekeeping, reportedly eighteen silver spoons of various weights and three silver mazers. Ten years later Katherine was still trying to retrieve her goods. Justices of Common Bench were supportive; they ordered Katherine to recover her chattels, as well as damages of 20s (£1), and Ellen was amerced.91 Women do not seem to have turned naturally to other women for financial support, nor do women creditors seem to have been more sympathetic to female borrowers. In addition, even though women pawned typically feminine items, they did so to men. Joanne Norman above pawned a horned girdle, worth 6s to her male landlord.92 Elizabeth Blount also put up her harnessed girdle as security for unpaid rent to her male landlord.93 Jordan’s hypothesis is further undermined by the fact that men clearly knew the value of women’s goods; why else would Richard Marton have burgled the home of Christina Baldok, a singlewoman and a spinster, and stolen many household items, including one silver-bound girdle?94 Nicholas Kyppyng was plainly well aware of the value of the items he was withholding from Marion Drake even after she married and set her husband to retrieve them. Among other things, the detained goods included four girdles of various colours and materials, four tablecloths, bed linens, two cushion covers and a variety of dresses, smocks, tunics and gowns—all domestic items.95 In fact, William Clerk sued Margery Wase, a singlewoman, specifically because he claimed she stole household goods from him. When he approached the court to indict Margery, he knew the value of these items. She reportedly stole many household goods, including a girdle decorated with silver and two gowns, totalling £20 6s 8d.96 Jordan’s conclusion, then, does not find support in the English sampling of records. The legal record has much to offer in terms of gaining a better understanding of how singlewomen survived in a society that generally denied their existence. As these examples confirm, English singlewomen preferred an independent lifestyle, even if the experience laid a woman open to ill treatment by dishonest landlords who knew a man’s word carried greater

Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice  73 weight in the courtrooms of medieval England. The singlewomen in this sampling of cases did not live with their families, nor did they huddle together in twos or threes. Admittedly, many other singlewomen may have adopted a communal lifestyle and because the experience was uneventful, they evaded the legal record (and thus the attention of historians); but we need to give priority to the surviving evidence over the logical presumption. The active role played by singlewomen in the world of credit supported and facilitated an autonomous lifestyle. The nature of their credit relationships offers a more positive assessment of the single lifestyle than has traditionally been assumed. The standard perception is that marriage was an economic necessity for women; yet, the evidence of the plea rolls reveal that women may have been more economically independent than was once thought. These singlewomen were not barely scraping by; they were vigorous businesswomen involved in a variety of trades. While the records do not corroborate the idea of marriage as an economic necessity, they do force us to rethink our vision of what it meant to be independent. In reality, both men and women in medieval England understood that singlewomen needed men to fight their legal battles. Male creditors preferred the guardianship model; they believed their chances of being repaid were significantly higher if they could sue a woman jointly with her husband, or at least another man. Women also recognized the need for male intervention; they realized that their chances of winning a suit against a male defendant were also much better with the support of a man. How representative were these singlewomen? The expenses of litigation in later medieval England make it clear that these singlewomen were not living on the margins of society. For those who appeared as plaintiffs, to plead a suit at Common Bench required a writ. Routine writs de cursu might be as cheap as 6d (at a time when an unskilled female labourer might earn 2d a day in wages);97 however they could only be obtained from Chancery (in London) either in person or through an attorney.98 In addition were the costs of hiring an attorney to represent one’s interests at court; and before justices of Common Bench were prepared to hear litigation, they expected both litigants to be present physically in the courtroom at Westminster Hall in London (although in subsequent appearances the presence of an attorney was acceptable).99 Given that most women appeared as defendants, while the plaintiff had to foot the bill for two visits to London (an expense that is measured best by one’s distance from central England), at the very least the defendant had only one journey to make. These costs are meaningful. While forms of legal aid existed in order to make justice widely available,100 the weight of these expenses makes it clear that a resolution at Common Bench was beyond the reach of those from the poorest segment of society. In many respects, this finding is what makes a study of singlewomen in the courts so critical: this evidence confirms that singleness did not necessarily consign a woman to the margins. These independent singlewomen, many of whom ran their own businesses, were active participants in the English economy.

74  Sara M. Butler

Notes 1 This project was greatly facilitated by Jonathan Mackman and Matthew Frank Stevens (eds), Court of Common Pleas: The National Archives, CP 40 1399– 1500 (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, et al., 2010), http://www. british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=1272. This keyword searchable database helped direct me to the records that I needed to look at in the archives. This database includes case summaries of 130 of the 400 surviving rolls spread evenly across the fifteenth century. 2 Y[ear]. B[ook]., Trin. 14, Edw. IV (1474), f. 7b. All translations from Law French or Latin are my own. For those records that appear in English, I have modernized all spelling for greater accessibility. 3 Brian Simpson, ‘The Source and Function of the Later Year Books’, The Law Quarterly Review 87 (1971), 96. A university law degree in the Middle Ages taught ecclesiastical law; thus, lawyers of the common law learned their trade primarily through attendance at court and careful study of the Year Books. 4 Cordelia Beattie, Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2007), p. 144. 5 Y. B. term uncertain, 18 Edw. III (1344), ff. 58b–59a. 6 Y. B. Trin. 21 Hen. VI (1443), fos. 48a–50b. Feme sole was a legal designation granted to licensed wives in large urban centres, permitting them to escape the bonds of coverture in order to trade and sell without explicitly requiring the permission of their husbands. 7 Luke Owen Pike (ed.), Year Books of the Reign of King Edward the Third: Year XIX (Rolls Series, no. 31, pt. B, v. 13, 1906), pp. 390–3. 8 Sharon Farmer, ‘ “It is not good that [wo]man should be alone”: Elite Responses to Singlewomen in High Medieval Paris’ in Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past (Philadelphia, 1999), p. 82. 9 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective’ in Bennett and Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past, p. 46. 10 An exception to the rule: Judith M. Bennett, A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, c. 1295–1344 (Boston, 1999). Bennett’s study of Cecilia Penifader, a never-married woman from the village of Brigstock (Northamptonshire), draws a picture of a woman who relied heavily on her strong familial support network, but whose independent behaviour resembled much more closely that of her brother-in-law than her married sister. Regrettably, though, as a woman with a comfortable inheritance who participated in the fourteenth-century land market, Penifader was really not your typical medieval singlewoman. 11 Beattie, Medieval Single Women, p. 19. See also Cordelia Beattie, ‘The Problem of Women’s Work Identities in Post Black Death England’ in James Bothwell, P.J.P. Goldberg and W. Mark Ormrod (eds), The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 1–19. 12 The intention here is not to present a static image of Europe either; certainly much diversity existed there as well in terms of singlewomen and their experience. Monica Chojnacka’s recent work on early modern Venice highlights the spending power of singlewomen also. See especially Chapter Two of her Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore and London, 2001). 13 Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Coverture and Capitalism’, History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), 3, 8. Erickson has gone so far as to hypothesize that the freedom and willingness of singlewomen to act as entrepreneurs was, in fact, the driving force behind England’s blossoming money economy. 14 Margaret Hastings, The Court of Common Pleas in Fifteenth Century England: A Study of Legal Administration and Procedure (Ithaca NY, 1947), p. 16. Some

Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice  75 of the cases of singlewomen in Common Bench appear also in Matthew Frank Stevens, ‘London’s Married Women, Debt Litigation and Coverture in the Court of Common Pleas’ in Matthew Frank Stevens and Cordelia Beattie (eds), Married Women and the Law in Premodern Northwest Europe (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 115–32. The overlap appears in instances of married women whose disputes revolved around actions perpetrated while single. However, Stevens examines these women through the lens of marriage rather than singleness. 15 Paul Brand, ‘Inside the Courtroom: Lawyers, Litigants and Justices in England in the Later Middle Ages’ in Peter R. Coss (ed.), The Moral World of the Law (Cambridge, 2000), p. 91. 16 England’s court of Chancery was a court of conscience, manned by the chancellor as sole judge and jury, and occupied with resolving the complaints of those whose cases existed without resolution through the normal channels of England’s common law courts. For more on Chancery, see Timothy S. Haskett, ‘The Medieval English Court of Chancery’, Law and History Review 14 (1996), 245–313. 17 The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first usage of ‘sengle woman’ to Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne in 1303. 18 C. L. Kingsford (ed.), A Survey of London, by John Stow: Reprinted from the Text of 1603 (Oxford, 1908), pp. 52–69. 19 Cordelia Beattie, ‘Governing Bodies: Law Courts, Male Householders, and Single Women in Late Medieval England’ in Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic and Sarah Rees Jones (eds), The Medieval Household in Christian Europe c.850– c.1550: Managing Power, Wealth and the Body (Turnhout, 2003), p. 218. 20 W. H. Stevenson (ed.), Records of the Borough of Nottingham, Being a Series of Extracts from the Archives of the Corporation of Nottingham, v. 3: 1485–1547 (Nottingham, 1885), p. 39. 21 A dispute over payment of a year’s worth of masses for the dead appearing in Common Bench for the year 1424 describes Joan Constantyn as a singlewoman; however, it also notes that the unpaid services were celebrated for her dead husband, John Broun. The National Archives: Public Record Office, Common Pleas [hereafter: TNA: PRO CP] 40/652, rot. 125. 22 Y. B. Pasch. 9 Hen. V; as it is recorded in Ralph V. Rogers (ed.), Year Books of the Reign of King Henry the Fifth (Wurzburg, 1948), pp. 3–4. 23 Sandy Bardsley, ‘Women’s Work Reconsidered: Gender and Wage Differentiation in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present 165 (1999), 11–12. 24 Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Working Women in English Society 1300–1620 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 45–6. 25 Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, ‘A Singular Past’ in Bennett and Froid (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past, p. 24. 26 An English mark was worth two-thirds of a pound. 27 In the interests of comparing like entities, all marks will be translated out to more readily recognizable denominations (pounds, shillings, pennies). 28 TNA: PRO CP 40/829, rot. 604 (1468). 29 TNA: PRO CP 40/952, rot. 113 (1500). 30 Mavis Mate, Women in Medieval English Society (Cambridge, 1999), p. 91. 31 Kate Kelsey Staples, Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in the Late Middle Ages (Leiden, 2011), p. 116. 32 Ibid., p. 163. 33 McIntosh, Working Women, p. 61. 34 TNA: PRO C[hancery] 1/64/764 (1475–80, or 1483–5). 35 TNA: PRO CP 40/673, rot. 416d (1421–2). 36 Pamela Nightingale, ‘Monetary Contraction and Mercantile Credit in Later Medieval England’, Economic History Review 2nd Series 43 (1990), 560.

76  Sara M. Butler 37 Marjorie McIntosh, ‘Money Lending on the Periphery of London, 1300–1600’, Albion 20 (1988), 560. 38 James L. Bolton, ‘Was there a ‘Crisis of Credit’ in Fifteenth-Century England?’, British Numismatic Journal 81 (2011), 145. 39 See Pamela Nightingale, ‘Money and Credit in the Economy of Late Medieval England’ in Diana Wood (ed.), Medieval Money Matters (Oxford, 2004), p. 62. 40 M. R. Horowitz, ‘A Country under Contract: Early-Tudor England and the Growth of a Credit Culture’, Essays in Economic & Business History 29 (2011), 77; Nightingale, ‘Money and Credit’, p. 63. 41 TNA: PRO C 1/64/1086 (1475–80, or 1483–4). 42 Reginald Robinson Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: Letter-Book D: 1309–14 (London, 1902), p. 250. 43 McIntosh, Working Women, p. 47. 44 TNA: PRO CP 40/737, rot. 402 (1445). 45 TNA: PRO CP 40/819, rot. 482d (1466). 46 TNA: PRO CP 40/ 673, rot. 296 (1429). 47 Elaine Clark, ‘Medieval Labor Law and English Local Courts’, The American Journal of Legal History 27 (1983), 339. 48 TNA: PRO CP 40/817, rot. 601d (1465). 49 TNA: PRO CP 40/799, rot. 491d (1460); CP 40/661, rot. 119d (1426). 50 William C. Jordan, Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies (Philadelphia, 1993), p.  28; Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Women, Credit and Family Relationships, 1300–1620’, Journal of Family History 30 (2005), 143–4; James Davis, Medieval Market Morality: Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 348. 51 Craig Muldrew emphasizes this also for the early modern period. See Muldrew, ‘ “A Mutual Assent of Her Mind?” Women, Debt Litigation and Contract in Early Modern England’, History Workshop Journal 55 (2003), 53. 52 Elaine Clark, ‘Debt Litigation in a Late Medieval English Vill’ in J. A. Raftis (ed.), Pathways to Medieval Peasants (Toronto, 1981), pp. 265, 267. See also Bolton, ‘Was there a ‘Crisis of Credit’, 152. 53 Ralph V. Turner, ‘The Origins of Common Pleas and King’s Bench’, The American Journal of Legal History 21 (1977), 238–54; Chris Briggs, ‘Manor Court Procedures, Debt Litigation Levels, and Rural Credit Provision in England, c. 1290–c.1380’, Law and History Review 24 (2006), 519–8. In ecclesiastical court, plaintiffs cloaked complaints revolving around debt as breach of promise suits. See R.H. Helmholz, The Oxford History of the Laws of England. Vol. 1. The Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction from 597 to the 1640s (Oxford, 2004), Chapter 6. 54 TNA: PRO CP 40/809, rot. 111d (1463), John Dobbes senior of Methwold v. Thomas and Alice Sampson of South Lynn; TNA: PRO CP 40/826, rot. 152 (1468), Andrew White of London v. John and Alice Smyth of Thaxted; TNA: PRO CP 40/752, rot. 432 (1449), William Botry of Southchurch v. John and Beatrice Musgrove of Ware. 55 Davis, Medieval Market Morality, p. 359. 56 TNA: PRO CP 40/675, rot. 429d (1429). The evidence of Common Bench reminds us that arbitration was not the special prerogative of the gentry, as it is sometimes understood by historians. See Matthew Frank Stevens, ‘Failed Arbitration Before the Court of Common Pleas: Cases Relating to London and Londoners, 1400–1468’, Journal of Legal History 31 (2010), 25. 57 Pamela Nightingale reminds us that ‘sales credits were normally interest-free loans of money’. See Nightingale, ‘Money and Credit’, p. 51. 58 TNA: PRO CP 40/756, rot. 332d.

Medieval Singlewomen in Law and Practice  77 59 TNA: PRO CP 40/754, rot. 012d (1449). For definitions, see Philip E. Jones (ed.), Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, Preserved Among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall, a.d. 1437–1457 (Cambridge, 1954), p. 3 notes 2 and 4. 60 TNA: PRO CP 40/669, rot. 137d (1428). 61 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘rygge’ is the fleece of a sheep’s back; a pelt or hide taken from the back of an animal. 62 TNA: PRO CP 40/812, rot. 251 (1464). 63 TNA: PRO CP 40/806, rot. 111 (1462). The Oxford English Dictionary states: ‘Any of several, probably often sweet, Portuguese wines from the Lisbon area, but freq. associated with the Auxois and Alsace areas of France’. 64 TNA: PRO CP 40/563, rot. 177 (1401). 65 TNA: PRO CP 40/651, rot. 223d (1423). 66 TNA: PRO CP 40/658, rot. 121 (1425). 67 TNA: PRO CP 40/803, rot. 324 (1462). 68 TNA: PRO CP 40/871, rot. 357d (1480); CP 40/952, rot. 393d (1500). 69 TNA: PRO CP 40/736, rot. 337 (1445). 70 TNA: PRO CP 40/658, rot. 263d (1425). 71 TNA: PRO CP 40/816, rot. 509 (1465). 72 William C. Jordan, ‘Women and Credit in the Middle Ages: Problems and Directions’, Journal of European Economic History 17 (1988), 44. 73 Nightingale, ‘Monetary Contraction’, 572. Here, we need to keep in mind that the reported size of a loan does not correspond exactly with the amount of money that changed hands. Because of the Church’s strong stand on usury, the legal record avoided the issue of charging interest by including that profit into the total sum of the loan recorded in the bond. Marjorie McIntosh suggests that a ‘normal interest rate’ would seem to have been roughly ten per cent, regardless of length of the loan term. See McIntosh, ‘Money Lending on the Periphery’, 563. However, when the loans were business-related, as opposed to personal, the rates were higher. See Gwen Seabourne, ‘Controlling Commercial Morality in Late Medieval London: The Usury Trials of 1421’, Journal of Legal History 19 (1998), 21. 74 TNA: PRO CP 40/566, rot. 75 (1402). 75 TNA: PRO CP 40/675, rot. 306d (1429). 76 TNA: PRO CP 40/669, rot. 314 (1428). 77 TNA: PRO CP 40/816, rot. 509 (1465). 78 Davis, Medieval Market Morality, p. 349. 79 McIntosh, ‘Women, Credit, and Family’, 147. 80 TNA: PRO CP 40/652, rot. 495d (1424). 81 TNA: PRO CP 40/674, rot. 568 (1429). 82 TNA: PRO CP 40/646, rot. 138 (1422). 83 Staples, Daughters of London, pp. 73–5. 84 TNA: PRO CP 40/874, rot. 325d (1480). 85 McIntosh, Working Women, p. 107. 86 Jordan, ‘Women and Credit in the Middle Ages’, p. 38. 87 TNA: PRO CP 40/653, rot. 268d (1424). 88 TNA: PRO C 1/66/368 (1475–80, or 1483–85). 89 Jordan, ‘Women and Credit in the Middle Ages’, p. 50. 90 Jordan, Women and Credit, pp. 28–33. 91 TNA: PRO CP 40/653, rot. 113d (1424). 92 TNA: PRO C 1/66/368 (1475–80, or 1483–85). 93 TNA: PRO C 1/64/764 (1475–80, or 1483–85). 94 TNA: PRO CP 40/661, rot. 124d (1426).

78  Sara M. Butler 95 TNA: PRO CP 40/821, rot. 503d (1466). 96 TNA: PRO CP 40/659, rot. 500 (1425). 97 Bardsley, ‘Women’s Work Reconsidered’, p. 6. 98 Andrew H. Hershey, Justice and Bureaucracy: The English Royal Writ and “1258”, The English Historical Review 113 (1998), 834. 99 Brand, ‘Inside the Courtroom’, p. 101. 100 A. J. Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester, 2001), p. 164.

5 Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration William Herbert’s Considerations in the Behalf of Foreiners (1662)* Andrew Spicer The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was accompanied with appeals to the crown and protests over the concessions and conciliatory approach taken towards aliens by ‘the late execrable Usurper’. In particular there was a backlash against Cromwell permitting the readmission of the Jews to England in 1655/56.1 A petition from the corporation of the City of London called upon the new king: to cause the former laws made against the Jews to be put in execution, and to recommend to your two Houses of Parliament to enact such new ones for the expulsion of all professed Jews out of your Majesty’s dominions, and to bar the door after them with such provisions and penalties as in your Majesty’s wisdom should be found most agreeable to the benefits of religion, the honour of your Majesty’s dominions, and the good and welfare of your subjects.2 The Jews were accused of undermining religion, infiltrating the nation, prejudicing the king’s plans, ‘gaining of money’ and having ‘debauched some . . . of the weaker sex to the abominable taint of the English blood’.3 A further lengthy remonstrance complained that ‘now the Jewes in generall . . . are many in number, soe are they for the most part exceeding rich potent & oppressive especially such as doe inhabite in & about your Citty of London’ and consequently ‘doe subdue keepe under and oppresse & take away much Trade traffick & Imployment from your poore & most loyall free borne subjects to whom they are become most execrable & detestable’.4 A London goldsmith and controversialist, Thomas Violet published a Petition Against the Jews, which presented both economic and religious arguments for the laws against the Jews to be reinstated and for new legislation to be introduced for their expulsion.5 Although some of these petitions were considered by Parliament, the protests quietly faded away and in 1664 the king granted the Jewish community ‘the same favour as formerly they have had so long as they demeane themselves peaceably and quietly with due obedience to his Maties Laws & without scandal to his Government’.6

80  Andrew Spicer These protests against the Jews were part of a wider debate concerning the rights and status of aliens in England in the mid-seventeenth century. During the Interregnum, there had been criticism of the commercial activities of ‘alien’ merchants and artisans, which were regarded as damaging the trade of native-born Englishmen. In 1657, an appeal was made to Parliament protesting against alien merchants being ‘admitted to Priviledges of English men by Naturalization’. This was published with a response ‘in behalf of the Merchants born beyond the Seas’ at the Restoration, but there were further petitions which outlined the reasons against the ‘frequent’ and ‘general’ naturalization of aliens.7 Alongside these protests, however, there were some who recognized the potential benefits that stemmed from the settlement of migrants in the realm. While opposed to the Jews, Thomas Violet had pointed to how the realm had benefited from the earlier settlement of Dutch migrants who had ‘brought many industrious manufactures into this Land; by which means, this Nation hath equally been enriched with the Merchant Strangers’.8 These Restoration debates regarding naturalization and the economic advantages of immigration have tended to be overshadowed by the later mass migration of the Huguenots escaping from religious persecution in Louis XIV’s France, which culminated in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. While historians have studied these issues in some detail for the later period, the focus of this essay is on the early 1660s.9 A brief tract published in 1662, William Herbert’s Consideration in the Behalf of Foreiners, which reside in England, draws together some of the key issues regarding the marginal status and place of foreigners at the Restoration. It discusses the social and commercial restrictions that would be alleviated by naturalization, but it also lightly touches on broader matters such as freedom of movement and toleration. In response to contemporary opinion, Herbert sought ‘to allay the tempest, which is too often rais’d in the minds of the vulgar sort; and to sweeten the bitterness of a bilious, or cholerick humor against strangers’.10 While the tract was intended to discuss foreigners in general, including ‘the English, who are out of their own Countrey’, the principal focus was on the situation in England. Much of the literature concerning aliens and issues such as naturalization was penned by English men, but the Considerations provides an opportunity to evaluate their position from a foreigner’s perspective. Herbert’s own background and origins are particularly difficult to establish. Although they are discussed by ‘a stranger’ and ‘a friend of the Author’ in the introductory conversation of Herbert’s French and English Dialogues (1660), it is claimed that Herbert deliberately concealed his place of birth lest ‘som fools would presently crie out, his French is not worth a Cabidge’.11 While this may well be just a literary device, tracing his career is complicated because there were several individuals with the same name recorded as foreigners or members of the exile congregations in the early seventeenth century.12 Besides the Considerations, Herbert composed and translated a number of devotional and religious tracts, and had close links with the

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  81 foreign congregations in the capital, which had been re-established a century earlier on the accession of Queen Elizabeth to serve the religious needs of the French and Dutch refugees from the continent.13 Herbert dedicated one work to ‘the Learned, Pious and Reverend Pastors, Elders and Deacons of all the French and Dutch Congregations in Great Britain . . . whose Zeale is great and wise’ and presented a copy to the Dutch congregation in the capital.14 He also became embroiled in the dispute between the longestablished French church in Threadneedle Street and Jean d’Espagne’s congregation at Somerset House, his pamphlet exacerbating the theological tensions between the two churches.15 The Considerations is Herbert’s last known work and bears the address ‘Charter-house London’; he had been admitted there, as a brother in Sutton’s almshouse, in May 1658.16 The Considerations is a relatively brief text; it is only four pages long and it is divided into twenty different points. Its structure and arrangement is reminiscent of the articles of war published during the Civil War, which outlined the appropriate and expected behaviour required of soldiers.17 Its brevity means that it can only provide an overview of the issues which faced foreigners at the Restoration. In the first eight points Herbert theorized about the nature of migration and the relationship between the immigrants and their hosts; this leads into a brief discussion on the Jews (No. 9) and nations ‘which doe refuse to intertain Strangers’ (10). While the tract considered the situation of foreigners in general, the next four points examined the basis of the particular affinity between the English and the French. Numbers 14 to 16 covered commercial matters, while the relatively lengthy points 17 to 20 focused broadly on religious issues. The one issue that is not addressed is the question of naturalization and nationality, even though these matters were being discussed in the mid-seventeenth century. Using these themes—freedom to migrate, religious belief, trade restrictions—and also naturalization, this essay will examine the status of foreigners in relation to native Englishmen at the Restoration.

I Herbert began by reflecting on the reasons for migration and the expectations that migrants might have of the communities where they settled. Although this is presented in a relatively unsophisticated manner, the arguments are underpinned by a clear understanding of the principles of natural law as well as divine law and civil law. While these laws had medieval antecedents, their articulation evolved in relation to religious co-existence and toleration during the course of the seventeenth century, particularly in the wake of the destruction of the Thirty Years’ War as well as the later exodus of the Huguenots in the wake of the Revocation.18 Herbert’s earlier tracts were also written against the background of the Civil War during which some theorists were developing arguments that justified the Parliamentarians taking up arms against the king.

82  Andrew Spicer Herbert argued ‘that wise Nature produces no animal . . . which desire not to preserve his being, and which, consequently, seek not the means of self-preservation’.19 According to medieval theorists, the self-preservation observed in nature was also innate behaviour for mankind. Furthermore, this natural law was endorsed by God through the Ten Commandments. The injunction to not commit murder was regarded as extending to selfmurder or suicide, which meant that self-preservation therefore became a direct injunction from God.20 The emerging political theory at the start of the Civil Wars had seen similar arguments expressed by several authors. William Bridge, for example, argued that ‘selfe-preservation is enacted in the Court of Nature’. He went on to state that ‘all creatures do defend themselves, and it is naturall so to do; yet we do not therefore say that a beast defends himself in the same manner as a man doth, or a man as a beast, but in a way sutable to every nature’. Bridge acknowledged that ‘if a private person be in danger to be oppressed by a Prince, flying is more fit defence for him, and therefore saith our Saviour, If they persecute thee in one City, flie to another’ but then went on to develop the argument that self-preservation could also justify the community in taking up arms to resist oppression.21 From his other works, it is clear that Herbert favoured passive resistance in accordance with traditional Protestant arguments rather than fighting those in authority.22 If they command some injustice, require of me what thou forbid’st; grant me reverend denialls. And if they forbid what thou dost command, let me tell them with great respect: thou art the greatest Lord, and so ought’st to be obey’d first. And if they’le compel me to injust obedience, give me a prudent and stout heart: prudent to appease their anger by satisfactorie reasons; or to avoid their furie by flight: and courageous to endure their torments, with Christian fortitude.23 Flight was the last resort, but because Scripture forbade ‘violent opposition’ to those in authority, if compelled to act against God’s commandments, where possible the faithful should ‘save both our goods and lives by flight’.24 With the outbreak of the Civil War, Herbert chose to flee rather than take up arms: . . . the sword hanging over our heads, the Canons [sic.] roaring about us, and destruction beginning to sweep the Kingdom . . . then ‘twas not fit time to write, but to remove often, to avoid the dangers and incommodities of Armies, and seek means of preservation, in a common desolation. I may say without vanitie, I am not a Coward: for ‘tis nothing, not to be such, unless I have the contrary vertue: yet my strength should not hold, to endure long the life of a souldier; nor my heart serve, to shed a drop of that dear blood, which dies and pollutes all our Land.25

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  83 The Considerations were written after the Restoration, which may have been the reason for Herbert choosing not to dwell on the displacement and suffering caused by the Civil War but rather to consider the causes of migration in a more generalized manner. Herbert looked to nature where ‘beasts change often their pastures and quarters; Birds flie from Country to Countrey: and Fishes swim from Sea to Sea, yea enter into our Rivers’. Similarly, mankind was able to migrate, for a range of reasons ranging from self-preservation to a natural desire for a more congenial environment: . . . men do oft leave their Native Countrey, because it is, either too populous, and so he cannot live by the other; or too steril, and so is not sufficient for all; or that the Air is contrary to their constitution; or that they have puissant enemies; or that the taxes are so great, that they can not be born[e]; or finally that Laws threaten them with loss of liberty or life for crime, or do not permit them the free exercise of their Religion.26 The final point raised by Herbert, concerning the threat to freedom of worship, had echoes in the reasons given by his co-religionists a century earlier when they had sought refuge in Elizabethan England.27 It was however artificial to make a distinction between foreigners and natives as ‘God having made one bloud all nations of men, to dwell over all the face of the Earth, it is a mark of Piety, and a duty of Humanity, to cherish that bloud’. In developing this argument, Herbert hints at the universal order that governs creation in accordance with God’s plan and which is underpinned by natural law as well as the Ten Commandments and Christ’s teachings.28 His idealized view of relations between foreigners and their hosts appears to recognize both that mankind is a species but also Christ’s fraternal new commandment to love one another: the Wise and the Religious, esteeming not that person a stranger, which hath the shape of a man, and the knowledge of God, have in all ages approv’d negotiations and conversation with others of their own species: and so ‘twas free for all to travell from place to place, every one professing his Science, teaching his Art, and working at his Trade; thus to entertain the Communion, which ought to be among all men, by a voluntary communication of the industry of their wits, the dexterity of their hands, and goods of their countreys.29 According to this argument, natural and divine law meant that foreigners should be welcomed and allowed to pursue their crafts, even passing on those skills to their host community. Reflecting the contemporary protests about the Jews, Herbert also briefly discussed the implications of their readmission to England for foreigners.

84  Andrew Spicer The matter is covered in one short paragraph, which makes clear not only Herbert’s low opinion of the Jews but also implicitly recognized that their treatment had implications for how immigrants in general should be treated. He described them as being ‘a covetous and inhumane nation’, which may have been influenced by recent accusations of usury that had been levelled by opponents of their readmission as well as the older stereotype of the Jew which held them responsible for the Crucifixion.30 In spite of this contempt, Herbert argued that God had ordered the Jews to be ‘civill and courteous to strangers’. He went on to condemn those who sought ‘expell them out of a Land, where they (poor souls) indeavour to live by their own labor’ as showing themselves to be ‘more cruell then a Jew’.31 This terse assessment is all that is said on the issue of the Jews and to a degree Herbert makes a distinction between them and ‘all nations of Europe’.32 Further afield, Herbert argued that while the world had been divided into many states, ‘all those Countreys (except China) have always been open to persons of other Nations’.33 As the earth had been given to ‘the children of men’, it was just that they should have ‘the liberty to dwell where it seems good to them’. There was however an obligation on these foreigners to live peaceably: . . . behaving themselves wisely, living according to the laws of the Land, and not presuming to play the Criticks in State affairs, whether Civill or Ecclesiasticall, no not so much in the humors nor manner of the Natives. This ‘Libertie’ meant that ‘man’ can ‘live everywhere, as well as in his Native Soil’ according to the rule of law. Furthermore, ‘Liberty of teaching and working every where’ was something that is attested to by both the holy and profane histories and in the example of St Paul—‘the grand Apostle of the Gentiles’—who maintained himself in various countries so that he was not ‘chargeable to the Churches of God’. Herbert provided supporting biblical references that highlighted the Apostle’s employment in these communities.34 While Herbert’s reflections on the status of immigrants was largely based on a medieval articulation and understanding of natural law, he appears to have been influenced by the political theories regarding self-preservation that had developed at the beginning of the Civil War. Furthermore, although there was an underlying sense of Christian unity in his arguments, Herbert advocated that there should be an acceptance of other faiths such as the Jews. This was significant because Herbert was writing at a time when the dissenters’ aspirations for acceptance, which had been raised in the Declaration of Breda failed to materialize, were instead met the restrictive terms of the 1662 Act of Uniformity and other legislation. While a number of Restoration churchmen and authors were opposed to religious dissent, new philosophical attitudes were also being formulated in the 1660s by Samuel

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  85 Pufendorf and John Locke regarding toleration, although they would not be published until some decades later. The acceptance of non-Christian faiths, i.e., the Jews, led Locke to argue in his Essay on Toleration in 1667, that similar toleration should be extended to the dissenters.35 The Considerations provides an indication into how attitudes towards immigrants and religious toleration were changing before the impact of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the philosophical advances of the later seventeenth century and the Enlightenment.

II Besides his discourse on migration and the reception of exiles, Herbert examined more closely religious aspects of the foreign community. It was ‘by reason of their religion’ that these aliens ‘dare not go back into Flanders . . . nor others, into France and Italie’. However, ‘their Churches, which have been stablisht in this Realm . . . under the pious and prudent government of our Religious and Gracious Monarch’ were sustained by the immigrants’ economic activities.36 Herbert argued that through ‘the fruits of their labor and industry, they entertain many hundreds of poor persons, and about sixteen Ministers of the holy Gospel, 12 or 13 Churches, they have in this Kingdom’. It was therefore important that aliens should have ‘the Liberty to trade and work in this Country’, in order to fulfil their existing financial commitments to their churches and impoverished members. Commercial restrictions would mean that these churches would ‘infallibly cease and be dissipated’.37 These foreign churches dated back to the exile congregations which had been established by the charter granted by Edward VI in July 1550 to those ‘strangers and foreigners, banished and cast out from their own country for the sake of the Gospel of Christ, and taking refuge in our realm’. These immigrants lacked a place ‘where they may hold their assemblies, where, among men of their own race and their present speech, they can intelligently discuss and treat of their religious affairs and ecclesiastical business according to the rite and custom of their country’. The church of Austin Friars was therefore assigned by the king, where the congregation of ‘Germans and other foreigners’ could meet to hear ‘an incorrupt interpretation of the most Holy Gospel and administration of the sacraments according to the word of God and Apostolic Observance’.38 The Dutch and French congregations that were established by this charter were initially placed under the authority of their own superintendant, the Polish reformer Jan a Lasco. However, when they were re-established following Queen Elizabeth’s accession, the bishop of London was appointed as their superintendant. With the influx of immigrants during the later sixteenth century, escaping the French religious wars and the conflicts in the Netherlands, as well as their socio-economic consequences, new communities were established outside the capital. These immigrants were permitted to worship in their own language according

86  Andrew Spicer to the liturgies of their continental co-religionists but their churches were under the authority of the local diocesan bishops. Although these communities were not subject to the terms of the 1559 Act of Uniformity, regular surveys of the alien population in the capital during Elizabeth’s reign sought to ensure that they either attended one of the foreign congregations or their parish church.39 It was these principles which underpinned the status of the foreign congregations in the mid-seventeenth century, and the 1550 charter also provided the basis for the establishment of the German Lutheran congregation by Charles II in 1669.40 The privileged status of the foreign congregations was not without controversy. In Elizabeth’s reign, those seeking a more radical religious settlement had looked to the model of these churches.41 During the 1630s, there had also been attempts by Archbishop Laud to restrict the membership and rights of these congregations, which he regarded as ‘great nurseries of inconformity’. As part of his attempt to impose religious uniformity, he argued that the privileges only extended to those foreign-born members of the congregation and required the children of exiles to attend their local parish church.42 There were even attempts to impose a French translation of the Book of Common Prayer on the newly established immigrant community at Sandtoft.43 Although the foreign churches had survived these attempts to curb their independence, their association with dissent and the question of conformity to the Church of England remained important issues at the Restoration. For some churchmen, the foreign churches symbolized the religious dissent which they regarded as responsible for the political turmoil and upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century. Peter Heylin, a supporter of Laud’s religious policies, regarded these congregations as being complicit in the English Civil War.44 Alongside this continued opposition to the exceptional situation of these churches, there was also pressure for conformity with the Church of England. In spite of opposition from the French church at Threadneedle Street which had been established in 1550, the king licensed a new congregation in 1661. This had developed from a break-away French congregation, which had begun holding sermons during the early 1640s and continued during the Interregnum. The new king gave them permission to meet at the Savoy Chapel, so long as they submitted ‘to the Church of England, under the immediate jurisdiction of the Bishop of London . . . and use the booke of common praiers by law established in their owne French language, according as it is used in the Island of Jersey’. In practice, this meant the adoption of a hybrid Anglican liturgy as the prayer book used on Jersey retained some Reformed elements.45 Furthermore, the first minister of the new congregation, Jean Durel published The Liturgy of the Church of England Asserted, which demonstrated that the prayer book was not contrary to the stance of the foreign congregations. It represented the pre-eminent Protestant liturgy and hence resisting its use equated to sedition and regicide.46 Herbert did not engage directly in this debate in his Considerations, but he was keen to stress the loyalty of the foreign churches to the monarch. He

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  87 went so far as to argue that as ‘the King of England is also King of France, and Defender of the Faith’, these Frenchmen had come to this country ‘to live Peacebly and Religiously, under the protection which he ows them, as King to his good Subjects, and as Defender of the Faith, unto Religious Souls, faithfull Christians, and holy Members of the Son of God’.47 Furthermore, the English were their co-religionists as the two nations were united in the ‘Communion of Saints’. Herbert defined this in the following terms: For since they acknowledge and adore the same God, and serve him the same way, indevouring to adjust their thoughts, affections, words, actions to the rule he hath given them, they ought to love one another dearly, as good Fellow servants, Members of one bodie, Children of one Father and Joint heirs of one and the same Happiness.48 Such claims looked beyond the ecclesiastical and liturgical differences between the two churches. Like an earlier Huguenot minister, Pierre du Moulin, he regarded the English Church as being a full member of the ‘Calvinist International’ that linked the Reformed Churches across Europe.49 Furthermore, Herbert linked the immigrants with the history of English Protestantism. He compared their plight with that experienced by those in the past who had sought exile during ‘Queen Maries days’ and could be read about in histories and ‘Bishop Jewel, who speaks of it by experience’.50 This approach not only emphasized their shared Protestant identity but it also reflected the interest of Restoration churchmen in the Reformation. They felt a pressing need to understand its history, while some saw it as providing models for the Restoration Church.51 Nonetheless the possibility of religious comprehension which had been anticipated at the Restoration was thwarted with the collapse of the Savoy Conference and the passing of the Act of Uniformity in May 1662, which included stringent measures for the use of the revised Book of Common Prayer that led to the ejection of a number of clergy from their livings. Discussion of the implications of this act for the immigrant communities appears to have overlooked the concession granted to the foreign churches.52 The ‘Proviso for Aliens of Foreign reformed Churches’ stated that ‘the penalties in this Act shall not extend to the Forreiners or Aliens of the Forrein Reformed Churches allowed or to be allowed by the Kings Majestie His Heires and Successors in England’.53 This amendment was lauded by Herbert: ‘this August Prince and his great Parliament do not intend that these poor Churches be brought to nothing since that in their behalf they have of late inserted an Article or Proviso in the Act of Uniformity’.54 There is no further discussion of this measure in the Considerations, but it made a distinction between those who dissented from the prayer book and the privileged status of the foreign congregations. While this dispensation was grudgingly accepted by some churchmen, it also led to questions as to why similar privileges could not be granted to dissenters.55 It is ironic that in

88  Andrew Spicer subsequent decades parallels were drawn between the treatment of the English nonconformists following the Act of Uniformity and Louis XIV’s persecution of the Huguenots, while the foreign congregations themselves were protected by the legislation.56

III The commercial and trading activities of foreigners were constrained by a raft of legislation that had been enacted over several centuries. These measures were intended to protect the interests of English merchants and artisans from what was regarded as unfair alien competition. The various acts attempted to limit the kind of goods that could be imported into the realm by foreigners as well as imposing conditions on where and when items could be sold. The operations of foreign artisans were also circumscribed including the number of apprentices or journeymen that they could employ. By the later sixteenth century, much of this legislation appears to have been moribund and not enforced by the authorities.57 Furthermore, the crown itself made exceptions to this earlier legislation when outlining the terms for the establishment of exile communities and churches during the first decades of Elizabeth’s reign. The letters patent issued to the immigrant communities established at Sandwich in 1561, Norwich (1565) and Maidstone two years later all noted that some of the terms contravened the statutes 1 Richard III and 32 Henry VIII. The negotiations for the Southampton community in 1567 similarly addressed areas which had been covered in earlier legislation, such as the number of apprentices, leasing property and customs duties.58 In spite of this apparent ambivalence of the government to past legislative constraints on the immigrant community and their activities, appeals continued to be made to these acts into the seventeenth century. The importance of this legislation can be seen in a lengthy petition against alien artisans which was submitted by London craftsmen in 1654. It looked to past laws and listed some of the underlying principles, but the petitioners went further, extrapolating and explaining the perceived consequences of the work of alien artisans and the dire threat that this posed for the realm and its people: Divers Parliaments have been so sensible of the premises that they have made divers statutes directly to countenance and encourage the natives in their manufactory trades and utterly to suppress or qualify the using of the said trade by strangers or importing of manufactures made and wrought beyond the seas (a thing in these days very frequent and usual) as the statutes of 7 Ed. 4, cap. 3; 1 R, 3, cap. 9 and 10, 1 Hen. 7, cap. 10, 21 H. 8, cap. 16, 22 Hen. 8, cap. 13, 32 Hen. 8, cap. 16. The reasons and causes of making the which said statutes are mentioned and expressed in the statutes themselves and are as follows: to restrain the excessive number and unreasonable behaviour of strangers; secondly,

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  89 because of the great detriment which did arise thereby to the subjects in general; thirdly, because it occasioned the natives for lack of work to fall into idleness; fourthly, because of the great falsehood and deceit practiced by strangers in the making of their wares and their uttering same at unreasonable prices, and their cunning and deceitful avoiding the governors of trade when searched for unlawful and unserviceable wares; fifthly, because they subtly convey and send over sea divers prohibited commodities; sixthly, because when they have gathered much riches and money, they conveyed the same over sea; seventhly, because many times they converted the same to the supply of the enemies of the nation; eighthly, because many times through the occasion of want of work, the native artificers fell to theft, murder, and other great offences, and so were put to death by the law to the great dishonour of the English nation; ninthly, for that the great number and continual recourse of strangers caused an extreme scarcity of grain and victual throughout the Commonwealth.59 Although not so alarmist, a subsequent petition made by London artisans to the king in 1660 similarly employed past parliamentary legislation to make their case against the commercial activities of alien craftsmen. On this occasion they were more specific about the terms that had been contravened. They cited statutes 3 Edward IV and 19 Henry VII, which had prohibited ‘the importing of several commodities of your petitioners’ trades’; they went on to list a range of luxury goods, including a number of items made of silk or gold thread, lace and ribbons. Under ‘the late usurper Cromwell’, it was alleged that close political relations with the French had led to the daily importation of these goods ‘not only in violation or the laws of the kingdom but to the ruin of thousands of your petitioners and the English trade’. Furthermore, contrary to 16 Richard II and 1 Richard III, which had restricted the retail sale of goods, the aliens were accused of selling items to the gentry in ‘inns, chambers, and other private places’. Alongside the importation of prohibited items, the petitioners claimed that foreign artisans had settled and exercised their trade in London and its environs, in defiance of several statutes: 1 Richard III, 1 Henry VII, and 5 Elizabeth I. The petitioners called upon the king to issue a proclamation ‘prohibiting the importation of the commodities before mentioned to be prohibited and forbidding of aliens from exercising their several vocations in this your kingdom’.60 It was not only the London craftsmen who appealed to these laws, the city authorities were also prepared to use them to harass and limit the activities of the immigrant community in the capital. The government, however, recognized the economic benefits that resulted from immigration. The Council of State received several petitions from the foreign congregation regarding ‘the greate troble and interruption they lye under and are subiecte unto for exercising their callings being Aliens to their extreme preiudice and unless relieved apparent ruine’. They complained that they were being harassed by

90  Andrew Spicer the ‘proceedings against them as are provided by the penal statutes’. In September 1653, the Council called upon the mayor and city council to stay the prosecution of aliens for the time being and asked for Parliament to review the existing legislation with a view ‘that all or so many of them as may be repealed as the Parliament shall think fit’. After the Restoration, there was a similar reluctance to see past legislation being used to harass the foreign community.61 In March 1661, the Council of Trade rejected the call for a proclamation restricting their activities by arguing, somewhat disingenuously, that it was not required as ‘the statutes against their importation are very express, and in force, and the law open’.62 The Considerations did not respond directly to the criticism and measures that had been used to harass the foreign community; Herbert did not adopt a legalistic approach nor did he refer to the letters patent or other official documents, which had delineated the terms and conditions for the establishment of the immigrant communities. Instead, Herbert engaged more generally with some of the issues that arose concerning the alien presence in the capital. He appealed to the principles of liberty and natural law, which he argued applied to any dealing and trading between the strangers and the English. Such transactions took place because the English ‘as a free nation, are willing to make use of them [aliens], delight in their dexterity, and do admire their inventions, confessing ‘tis from them that the Natives have many fine Manufactures, and learnt of them pretty knacks and excellent things’. This emphasis on the economic benefits that stemmed from the commercial links between strangers and their host community, namely the introduction of new products and techniques, accorded with the sentiments of those who were in favour of immigration. Herbert engaged with the criticism of aliens and the attempts to restrict their activities in a similarly generalized manner. It is clear though that he was aware of the accusations that the Englishmen were disadvantaged by the retail activities of immigrants, who were also seen as depriving them of work. Herbert argued, however, that there were no grounds for condemning their transactions ‘unless it be proved, either that those strangers force the Natives of the Country, to take their Wares, or to make use of their service; or that the English have not the liberty to do either’. Furthermore ‘the English, to follow their caprichio, or foolish fancy, employ any Strangers . . . either by reason of some acquaintance or familiarity they had before with those Strangers; or through compassion of their poverty; or in consideration of their Religion; or because the commodities and work of those Strangers please them better; or that they stand in need of them, and perhaps that they are cheaper’.63 The Considerations therefore engage with some of the issues that concerned the native English but did not do so in a confrontational manner. Instead, it attempted to raise the level of debate beyond the legal restrictions that could be used to constrain or harass the foreign community, to consider more the economic benefits that their presence could convey. Furthermore,

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  91 as Herbert emphasizes, the employment and prosperity of foreigners is ultimately determined by their English hosts

IV The social and economic restrictions on aliens could be mitigated through an act of naturalization or a patent of denization. The principal distinction between these two grants related to their source; an application for a parliamentary act was a more complicated, expensive, and less certain procedure than being granted a letter patent, as well as being dependent on Parliament actually being in session. During the later sixteenth century, letters of denization were used as one means by which to control the immigrant population, but they also came to be regarded by the immigrants themselves as providing a degree of protection and security. Whereas naturalization granted the recipient the rights of a native-born Englishman, denizens continued to be subject to certain restrictions which applied to aliens. They were prevented from inheriting or bequeathing land and were liable to higher rates of customs and local duties. Nonetheless, the number of letters of denization granted far exceeded the acts of naturalization although due to the difficulty and expense, only a minority of the immigrant population obtained either. Between 1558 and 1640, there were some 2,778 patents of denization compared to 83 acts, but these figures obscure the gradual decline in patents and increase in the number of acts over the same period. Furthermore, while acts of naturalization had in the past been granted principally to the children of Englishmen born overseas, their application gradually broadened in the mid-seventeenth century to include aliens.64 While aliens could ameliorate their status by these means, the legal position of the children of aliens born in England was less certain. There were attempts to extend the financial penalties and restrictions on foreigners to the next generation rather than acknowledging that they had similar rights to native Englishmen. Although the Calvin case in 1608 had established the principle that nationality was determined by an individual’s place of birth, and hence allegiance to the ruler, in practice it was still assumed that it was based on descent, so that the children of aliens were treated similarly to their parents.65 In London, the economic activities of the descendants of immigrants continued to be restricted and they were liable to higher rates of local taxation.66 The strangers in Norwich were liable for not only parochial dues but also the costs for the maintenance of the ministry and poor of the exile churches; this had led some to leave the congregation for their parish church. The Privy Council responded in 1621 by ordering those concerned and others ‘of that Walloon congregation although borne within this kingdome shall continue to be of that church and societie soe long as his Majestie shalbe pleased to permit the same and shalbe subject to such discipline as hath beene . . . usually practised amongst them’.67 By the mid-seventeenth century, the refusal of English-born sons of immigrants to pay the aliens’

92  Andrew Spicer higher rate of customs duties had become a particularly contentious issue for the London authorities.68 Exemption from the higher rate of customs duties paid by foreigners and other economic advantages were part of the wider opposition to the naturalization of aliens. This was principal objection raised against ‘the sixty Merchants Alien, who pretended to be Naturalized in the Year 1657’. It was claimed that they had ‘saved unto themselves, above 20000 l. in Customs, which by Charta Mercatoria is due, and ought to be paid unto his Majesty, and will save 10000 l. per annum, which might otherwise be paid by them, towards the publique Charge, and ease of the Natives’.69 It was also argued that it gave foreign merchants an unfair commercial advantage over native Englishmen, ‘so that it is humbly conceived there is great reason the differences in Customs between Aliens and Natives should be continued, and that the persons naturalized should pay Duties as Aliens’.70 Other protests made similar commercial arguments against naturalization and how this would result in ‘advancing aliens in riches and honour, and impoverishing the native subjects’.71 Such accusations were countered by those who recognized the economic advantages of not taxing foreign merchants in this manner. A tract responding to the claim that the naturalization of merchants in 1657 had led to the loss of customs duties, argued that ‘this increase of Trade is to be ascribed to the encouragement this Naturalization gave them, the benefit whereof will be found to redound more to this Kingdom, than the Parties Naturalized, by this enlargement of Trade, though paying but single Customes’.72 The crown certainly recognized the financial advantages of encouraging trade in this manner. Parliament discussed bills for naturalizing foreign merchants in 1660, 1662 and 1664, with similar arguments being put forward in favour and against the measures, but all of these attempts lost momentum and were not enacted.73 Nonetheless, there was one act which did extend naturalization to foreign artisans, which the government wanted to attract to establish linen and tapestry manufacture. It offered foreigners ‘all privileges whatsoever as the natural born subjects of this kingdom’ subject to taking the oath of allegiance, and that they should ‘not any time by liable to any other or greater taxes, payments, or impositions than such as are or shall be paid by his Majesty’s natural born subjects’.74

V The Considerations in the Behalf of Foreiners offers an alternative perspective on the immigrant community in the mid-seventeenth century to that provided by other contemporary publications. These works were largely concerned with petitioning against the perceived advantages and benefits that had been or might be granted to immigrants, which would be to the detriment of native-born Englishmen. Herbert wrote from the vantage point of the foreigner and did not engage directly with the attacks upon

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  93 the immigrant population. While this was not a refutation of the accusations being made at the Restoration, Herbert did address some of the key concerns that were raised in these other publications. He also saw that the attack upon the Jews and the protests against their readmission had implications for the immigrant community as a whole. The foreign churches and their congregations had been established in the capital for a century and in some instances the issues that were raised reflected the slow process of integration and the willingness or otherwise to accept as English the descendants of the original refugees. The Jewish presence in the capital had grown rapidly since their readmission, but this was still a relatively small community when compared to the influx of Huguenots in the later seventeenth century, which also prompted concern about the immigrant presence and their relationship to native Englishmen.75 While the issue of naturalization was being discussed in the 1660s, it became much more significant several decades later in relation to the Huguenots and in particular the poor Palatines, who received a more hostile reception than the French immigrants a couple of decades earlier.76 Interestingly, Herbert seems to downplay the distinction between the English and the French in a way that may not have been possible following the emergence of Louis XIV as a threatening foreign power and the Huguenot exodus. He points to the historic association between the two nations, their ‘consanguinitie’ and that in England there are ‘thousands of families, which are descended from the French; and as many or more in France, whose Progenitors are English’.77 The shared experience of exile also established a common bond between the two nations. For those Englishmen who had fled the realm during ‘Queen Maries days’ and ‘the late troubles of this State’, their ‘Gratitude and Generosity oblige them to render like for like, in shewing to strangers as much Charity and Civility, as they have received in their want’.78 Furthermore, Herbert minimized the religious differences between the two nations, regarding them as being united together in the ‘Communion of Saints’. One of the strengths of Herbert’s brief assessment of the status of immigrants is the range of subjects that it covers. Economic matters are discussed but in a fairly generalized manner, particularly emphasizing the merits of immigration and the freedom enjoyed by native Englishmen in their dealings with foreigners. There is no attempt to engage with the question of naturalization at all or with the legal status and privileges of the foreign communities. This even includes the 1550 charter granted by Edward VI to Jan a Lasco, which generally seems to have been regarded by all the foreign churches as their founding charter. Ultimately this may have been part of Herbert’s conciliatory approach, which was perhaps intended to appeal to a wider audience with its seemingly straightforward analysis of relations between the immigrants and their host community. Although a similar understanding can be seen in his explanation of the reasons and causes of migration, this was underpinned by a much deeper

94  Andrew Spicer awareness of the developing philosophical views regarding natural law and political resistance. However, ultimately the treatment of ‘these poor souls who live here among them’ was a cause for ‘Humanity’. These foreigners provided an invitation ‘to cast most gracious looks on one another, to love any man tenderly, and to seek and embrace all occasions to serve others, as we are desirous to be assisted in our wants’.79

Notes * I am grateful to Robin Gwynn for his comments on an earlier version of this essay. 1 David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (Oxford, 1982), p. 142; David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 140–1. See also Andrew Crome, ‘English National Identity and the Readmission of the Jews, 1650s–1656’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66 (2015), 280–301. 2 Quoted in Lucien Wolf, ‘Status of the Jews in England After the Re-Settlement’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society 4 (1903), 182, 188. 3 Ibid., 186–8. 4 Ibid, 191; Katz, Philo-semitism and the Readmission of the Jews, p. 242. 5 Thomas Violet, A Petition Against the Jewes, Presented to the Kings Majestie and the Parliament (London, 1661). 6 Katz, The Jews in the History of England, p. 142. 7 Reasons humbly offered to the Parliament, by the free-born merchants of England shewing cause why the sixty merchants aliens, who pretended to be naturalized in the year 1657, and other aliens trading as merchants, should not be admitted to priviledges of English men by naturalization . . . (London?, 1660); Reasons Humbly Offered against the Frequent Naturalization of Aliens (London, 1662?); Reasons Against the General Naturalization of Aliens (London, 1662?). 8 Thomas Violet, [The Advancement of Merchandize.] Mysteries and Secrets of Trade and Mint-affairs (London, 1653), p. 17. 9 Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage: The History and Contribution of the Huguenots in Britain (Brighton, 2001); Bernard Cottret, The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 1991); Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen. The Controversy Over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark, 1995); Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews; Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade. The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720 (Oxford, 2001); Caroline Robbins, ‘A Note on General Naturalization Under the Later Stuarts and a Speech in the House of Commons on the Subject in 1664’, The Journal of Modern History 34 (1962), 168–77; David Resnick, ‘John Locke and the Problem of Naturalization’, The Review of Politics 49 (1987), 368–88; Daniel Statt, ‘The Birthright of an Englishman: The Practice of Naturalization and Denization of Immigrants Under the Last Stuarts and Early Hanoverians’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 25 (1989), 61–74; Daniel Statt, ‘Daniel Defoe and Immigration’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1991), 293–313; Susan Lachenicht, ‘Huguenot Immigrants and the Formation of National Identities, 1548–1787’, The Historical Journal 50 (2007), 309–31. 10 William Herbert, Considerations in the Behalf of Foreiners, which reside in England (London, 1662), p. 1. 11 [William Herbert], Herberts French and English Dialogues. In a More Exact and Delightful Method than any yet Extant (London, 1660), pp. 12–13.

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  95 12 Some historians, including myself, have previously considered that William Herbert, the author and translator, was the same person as one William Herbert who, in 1617, was recorded in a list of ‘Stranger Merchants members of the Dutch congregation in London’ but as being the ‘sonne of an Englishman, borne beyond the seas’. The merchant William Herbert applied for an act of naturalization in March 1621, which stated that he had been born at ‘Margis in Flanders under the government and obedience of the Prince of Orange and the States’. It has not been possible to identify ‘Margis’, and ‘Flanders’ may have been used here in a generic sense for the Low Countries. However, the application stated that Herbert’s father was executed for his Protestant beliefs, which indicates that this was probably in the Southern Netherlands rather than the emergent Dutch Republic. If these details are correct, it suggests that Herbert was possibly born before the fall of Antwerp in 1585. Although Herbert was ‘very young’ when he came to England following the execution of his father, by 1621 he had been a communicant member of the Dutch Church in London for 13 or 14 years according to the minister’s attestation. This implies that he may have been at least in his early thirties in 1621. The first reference to William Herbert the author and translator is his marriage in 1635, his publications appearing over the subsequent two decades. Although not conclusive, these dates and different careers suggest that these men were probably not the same person.   Herbert also needs to be distinguished from ‘William Hebart Native of France’. In his petition to the king, Hebart stated that ‘your Petitioner did heretofore serve your Royal Grandfather k. James as Groome of his Privy Chamber, and being now disabled by old age and his many infirmities from maintaining himselfe by his profession is by the Charity of the Rt Reverend the Lord Bishop of London recommended to a place in Sutton’s Hospitall. May it please your Majesty to put him into a capacity to receave that Charity by granting him right of Denison’. This petition is undated but has been ascribed to ‘1665?’; it clearly dates from after the Restoration. This is probably the William Herbert ‘native of France’ who received a letter of denization on 7 November 1663. It seems likely that ‘Hebart’ was the same person as William Herbert, servant to the King Charles I, who according to the return of aliens was living in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields in 1635.   The author William Herbert had been resident at Sutton’s Hospital since May 1658, being nominated by Viscount Lisle, and gave the Charterhouse as his address in signing off the Considerations on 18 June 1662. Hebert/Hebart was only nominated to the almshouse by the bishop of London on 24 June 1662. Furthermore Herbert had been resident in Somerset rather than London in 1635, where he was recorded as getting married on 27 April.   Sources: The former Parliamentary Archives, Houses of Parliament, London, HL/PO/JO/10/1/14, Draft of ‘An Act for the naturalization of William Herbert’, 7 March 1621; The National Archives, London, MS Secretaries of State: State Papers Domestic, Charles II. SP 29/142A, f. 131; Calendar of State Papers Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles II, edited by Mary-Anne Everett Green et al. (London, 1860–1938), V (1665–66), p. 150 [I am grateful to Robin Gwynn for this reference]; Charterhouse Muniments, G/2/2 Governors’ Assembly Orders, 1638–58, f. 191, G/2/3 Governors’ Assembly Orders, 1658–98, f. 39v [I am grateful to Stephen Port for this reference]; Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland, 1603–1700, edited by William A. Shaw, Huguenot Society Quarto Series 27 (1911), 21, 27, 55, 93; Richard E.G Kirk and E.F. Kirk (eds), Returns of Aliens Dwelling in the City and Suburbs of London from the Reign of Henry VIII. To That of James I, 3 vols, Huguenot Society Quarto Series 10 (1900–8), III, 150, 165; Returns of Strangers in the Metropolis, 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639: A Study of an Active Minority,

96  Andrew Spicer edited by Irene Scouloudi, Huguenot Society Quarto Series 57 (1985), 295; Ole P. Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart Loudon: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars 1603–1642 (Leiden, 1989), pp. 51–2, 229; Andrew Spicer, ‘William Herbert fl. c. 1606–1662’ in H.C.G. Matthew, B. Harrison et al. (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004–), XXVI, pp. 745–6; Stephen Porter, The London Charterhouse (Amberley, 2009) p. 45. 13 See Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986). 14 [William Herbert], Herbert’s Quadripartit Devotion for the Day, Week, Month, Yeare (London, 1648). 15 William Herbert, Reponse aux questions de Mr Despagne addressés à l’Eglise Françoise de Londres (London, 1657); A Calendar of the Letter Books of the French Church of London from the Civil War to the Restoration, edited by Robin D. Gwynn, Huguenot Society Quarto Series 54 (1979), 17. 16 Spicer, ‘William Herbert’; Porter, The London Charterhouse, p. 45. I am grateful to the author for the latter reference. 17 Barbara Donagan, ‘Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War’, Past & Present 118 (1988), 83–6. See for example, Orders and Institutions of War. Made and Ordained by His Majesty, and by Him Delivered to His Generall His Excellence the Earle of Newcastle (s.l., 1642). 18 Thomas Anhert, ‘Samuel Pufendorf and Religious Toleration in the Early Enlightenment’, and Timothy Stanton, ‘Natural Law, Nonconformity, and Toleration: Two Stages on Locke’s Way’ in Jon Parkin and Timothy Stanton (eds), Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment, Proceedings of the British Academy 186 (2013), 15–33, 35–57; Ruth Whelan and Carol Baxter (eds), Toleration and Religious Identity. The Edict of Nantes and Its Implications in France, Britain and Ireland (Dublin, 2003). 19 Herbert, Considerations, p. 1 20 Merio Scattola, ‘Before and After Natural Law. Models of Natural Law in Ancient and Modern Times’ in T.J. Hochstrasser and P. Schröder (eds), Early Modern Natural Law Theories. Contexts and Strategies in the Early Enlightenment (Dordrecht, 2003), pp. 3–5; Sarah Mortimer, ‘Natural Law and Holy War in the English Revolution’ in Charles W.A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (eds), England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited (Farnham, 2011), pp. 196–8. 21 Ibid, p. 198; William Bridge, The Truth of the Times Vindicated (London, 1643), pp. 14, 19. 22 See Harro Höpfl (ed.), Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (Cambridge, 1991); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1978), II, pp. 15–19, 191–4. 23 [William Herbert], Herberts Careful Father and Pious Child, Lively Represented in Teaching and Learning the Catechisme (London, 1648), pp. 24–5. 24 Ibid., No. 670–71. 25 Ibid., preface. 26 Herbert, Considerations, p. 1 27 Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, pp. 182, 216–18, 263–4. For example, the refugees who established the community at Southampton in 1567 had argued that they could not ‘endure and abide our consciences to be burdened and in especiall to beare the intolerable clogge of the Spanish Inquisicon. Wee have determined with our selves without regard either of the losse of our goodes or native Countrey to seeke out another place of habitacon where it may be lawfull for us to live more quietly and Christian like’, British Library, Cottonian MSS, Vespasian FIX, f. 230. See Andrew Spicer, The French-Speaking Reformed Community and Their Church in Southampton, 1567–c. 1620, Southampton Records Series 39 (1997), p. 30.

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  97 8 Scattola, ‘Before and After Natural Law’, pp. 6–7. 2 29 Herbert, Considerations, p. 1. 30 Ibid., p. 2. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 1. The reason for the identification of China as being hostile to immigration is unclear. It may relate to the apparent Chinese indifference to English attempts to establish commercial relations in the first half of the seventeenth century. It is improbable that, at the time of writing, Herbert could have heard about, and was therefore referring to, the expulsion of the Dutch colony from Formosa (Taiwan) by the Chinese warlord Koxinga in February 1662. Marguerite Eyer Wilbur, The East India Company and the British Empire in the Far East (New York, 1945), pp. 321–2; Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–42 (Cambridge, 1969), p. 6; Leonard Blussé, ‘No Boats to China. The Dutch East India Company and the Changing Pattern of the China Sea Trade, 1635–1690’, Modern Asian Studies 30 (1996), 51–76; Chiu HsinHui, The Colonial ‘Civilizing Process’ in Dutch Formosa: 1624–1662 (Leiden, 2008), pp. 5, 221–3. 34 Herbert, Considerations, p. 2; Acts 18:3, 20:34; I Corinthians 4:12; I Thessalonians 2:9; II Thessalonians 3:8. 35 John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and the Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 94–137 (especially 115–24), 440–66; Thomas Anhert, ‘Samuel Pufendorf and Religious Intolerance’, pp. 15–33; Stanton, ‘Natural Law, Nonconformity, and Toleration’, pp. 35–57; Nabil Matar, ‘John Locke and the Jews’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993), 45–62; Nabil Matar, ‘England and Religious Plurality: Henry Stubbe, John Locke and Islam’ in Charlotte Methuen, Andrew Spicer and John Wolfe (eds), Christianity and Religious Plurality, Studies in Church History 51 (2015), pp. 181–203. 36 Herbert, Considerations, p. 3. 37 Ibid. 38 J. Lindeboom, Austin Friars. History of the Dutch Reformed Church in London, 1550–1950 (The Hague, 1950), p. 201; Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986), pp. 24–5, 31–2. 39 Andrew Spicer, ‘ “Of no church”: Immigrants, liefhebbers and Confessional Diversity in Elizabethan London, c. 1568–1581’ in Isabel Karremann, Cornel Zwierlein and Inga Mai Groote (eds), Forgetting Faith? Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe (Berlin, 2012), pp. 199–220. 40 Hamburger Lutherische Kirche London 1669–1969 (Berlin, 1969), p. 100. 41 Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Puritans and the Foreign Reformed Churches in London’ in his Godly People. Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983)‚ pp. 256–57, 260–61; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, pp. 272–3. 42 Jean Bulteel, A Relation of the Troubles of the Three Forraign Churches in Kent (London, 1645); Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), pp. 349–51. 43 G. H. Overend, ‘The First Thirty Years of the Foreign Settlement in Axholme, 1626–1656’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 2 (1887–88), 295–96, 304. 44 John McDonnell Hintermaier, ‘Rewriting the Church of England: Jean Durel, Foreign Protestants and the Polemics of Restoration Conformity’ in Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton (eds), From Strangers to Citizens. The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland and Colonial America, 1550–1750 (Brighton, 2001), pp. 354–55; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed. The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 512–17; Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic

98  Andrew Spicer in Seventeenth-Century England. The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester, 2007), pp. 18–19, 210–13. See also Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: the Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 2011), p. 152. 45 Robin Gwynn, ‘Strains of Worship: the Huguenots and Non-Conformity’ in David J. B. Trim (ed.), The Huguenots: History and Memory in Transnational Contexts. Essays in Honour and Memory of Walter C. Utt (Leiden, 2011), pp. 144–5. 46 McDonnell Hintermaier, ‘Rewriting the Church of England’, pp. 354–56. See also Robin D. Gwynn, ‘James II in the Light of His Treatment of Huguenot Refugees in England, 1685–1686’, English Historical Review 92 (1977), 823–25, 830–31. 47 Herbert, Considerations, p. 3. 48 Ibid., p. 2. 49 Elisabeth Labrousse, ‘Great Britain Envisaged by the Huguenot Ministers of the Seventeenth Century’ in Irene Scouloudi (ed.), Huguenots in Britain and Their French Background, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke, 1987), p. 147. 50 Herbert, Considerations, p. 4. 51 Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England, pp. 13–15. 52 Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen, pp. 68–70. 53 Documents Relating to the Settlement of the Church of England by the Act of Uniformity of 1662 (?, 1862), p. 435; The Statutes of the Realm, edited by A. Luders et al, 12 vols (London, 1810–28), V, p. 367. 54 Herbert, Considerations, p. 3. 55 Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England, pp. 152, 171, 177. 56 Anne Dunan-Page, ‘Introduction’ in Anne Dunan-Page (ed.), The Religious Culture of the Huguenots, 1660–1750 (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 15–16; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and the Early Enlightenment Culture, pp. 96–7, 102–4, 108. 57 Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us. Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London, 1996), pp. 61–77; Irene Scouloudi, ‘A Study of the Position of Strangers in the Metropolis’ in Returns of Strangers in the Metropolis, p. 7; Jacob Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (Farnham, 2010), pp. 70–74; Raingard Esser, ‘Citizenship and Immigration in 16th- and Early 17th-Century England’ in Steven G. Ellis, Guðmundur Hálfdanarson and Ann Katherine Isaacs (eds), Citizenship in Historical Perspective (Pisa, 2006), pp. 237–52. 58 Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Elizabeth, edited by Margaret Post et al (London, 1939–), II, p. 336, III, pp. 209–10, IV, pp. 39–40; Spicer, The French-Speaking Reformed Community and Their Church in Southampton, pp. 30–4. 59 Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), p. 728. 60 Ibid., pp. 735–37. 61 Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London, pp. 115–16. 62 Thirsk and Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, p. 738; Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen, pp. 66–7. 63 Herbert, Considerations, pp. 2–3. 64 Scouloudi, ‘A Study of the Position of the Strangers in the Metropolis’, pp. 1–9; Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London, pp. 49–50, 113. 65 Scouloudi, ‘A Study of the Position of the Strangers in the Metropolis’, pp. 1–3; Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London, pp. 87–100. 66 Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London, pp. 100–8.

Aliens, Native Englishmen and Migration  99 67 Andrew Spicer, ‘Poor Relief and the Exile Communities’ in Beat Kümin (ed.), Reformations Old and New: Essays on the Socio-Economic Impact of Religious Change, c. 1470–1630 (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 252–53; Thirsk and Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, pp. 714–16; Acts of the Privy Council of England. New Series, edited J.R. Dasent et al (London, 1890–), 38 July 1621– May 1623, pp. 57–8. 68 Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London, pp. 115–17. 69 Reasons Humbly Offered to the Parliament, by the Free-Born Merchants of England, p. 1. 70 Ibid. 71 Reasons Humbly Offered Against the Frequent Naturalization of Aliens; Reasons Against the Naturalization of Aliens. 72 Answer to the Reasons, per contra, in the behalf of the Merchants born beyond Seas, who by long Consuetude and reall Affection to this Nation, did obtain Naturalization in the Year 1657. 73 Robbins, ‘A Note on General Naturalization’, 171–74, 176–77; Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen, pp. 68–70; Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London, pp. 119–20. 74 Statutes of the Realm, V, p. 498; Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London, pp. 119–20. 75 Lisa Clark Diller, ‘How Dangerous, the Protestant Stranger? Huguenots and the Formation of British Identity, c. 1685–1715’ in Trim (ed.), The Huguenots: History and Memory in Transnational Contexts, pp. 103–20; John M. Hintermaier, ‘The First Modern Refugees? Charity, Entitlement, and Persuasion in the Huguenot Immigration of the 1680s’, Albion 32 (2000), 429–49. 76 Daniel Statt, ‘The City of London and the Controversy Over Immigration, 1660–1722’, Historical Journal 33 (1990), 45–61; H. T. Dickinson, ‘The Poor Palatines and the Parties’, English Historical Review 82 (1967), 464–85; Alison Olson, ‘The English Reception of the Huguenots, Palatines and Salzburgers, 1680–1734: A Comparative Analysis’ and William O’Reilly, ‘The Naturalization Act of 1709 and the Settlement of Germans in Britain, Ireland and the Colonies’ in Vigne and Littleton (eds), From Strangers to Citizens, pp. 481–91, 492–502. 77 Herbert, Considerations, p. 2. 78 Ibid., p. 4. 79 Ibid.

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Part III

Work

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6 Down but Not Out A Case Study in Early Modern Social Mobility From the Margins Joel F. Harrington

What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? What is that honour? Air. Henry IV, Pt I, Act V, Scene 1, 133–135

Among the many sins and injustices of the European ancien régime, according to popular wisdom, one of the worst was the utter inflexibility of its social hierarchy. With very few exceptions, an individual would tend to remain at the same social status from birth to death, particularly if unfortunate enough to be counted among the various groups considered low, unclean, or disreputable. Not until the economic and social disruptions of modern capitalism, industrialization, and democratic government— particularly idealized and venerated in the early republic of the United States of America—would both the dream and reality of social mobility become more common phenomena. But was such pre-modern social rigidity in fact the case? Nearly a century after the publication of Pitrim Sorokin’s classic Social and Cultural Mobility, the apparent consensus among historians is that it was not (or at least not entirely).1 There has never been such a thing as a thoroughly static society, no matter how seemingly inflexible the caste or class system. Social mobility through service (especially military or administrative) as well as through wealth may not have been common in ancien régime Europe, but it was always possible.2 The pre-modern ideal of social order, with the prevailing sixteenth-century metaphor of a healthy body eventually yielding to the Enlightenment image of a well-functioning machine, could in fact tolerate a surprising degree of fluctuation—as long as the nature of that order itself was not challenged.3 And the undisputed Grundprinzip of that social order was the concept of honour. Early modern contemporaries and modern historians consequently agree that even limited social mobility could not apply to any of the individuals considered “dishonourable.”4 But “what is honour?,” as Shakespeare asks. The definition of who exactly constituted the marginalized and dishonourable of pre-modern Europe is more elusive than we might expect. Even

104  Joel F. Harrington limiting ourselves to general trends and apparent points of popular consensus, answers to Shakespeare’s question remain profoundly subjective. Illegitimacy, for instance, was usually a social handicap of some degree, but that degree ranged considerably from a minor embarrassment to certain legal restrictions to profound scandal, depending on the immediate cultural and chronological context.5 “Low status” of parents, another presumably disadvantageous condition, was variously defined and often had less to do with a family’s actual wealth than its reputation within a specific community. Both of these conditions, of course, might be concealed by simple relocation, though not without the spectre of suspicion that hovered above all “foreigners,” even those who spoke the same dialect. (Emigration across the ocean was another matter and potentially more liberating for all of the socially marginalized of Europe). Ethnic background in general, particularly among Jews and Gypsies, might prove somewhat more difficult to evade but hardly insurmountable. We know from court records that at least some of these marginalized individuals were able to pass as “German” when necessary—a source of great consternation when discovered.6 Only when an individual’s body was permanently scarred—either by a disease such as leprosy or by a judicial disfigurement such as branding or cropped ears—did geographical mobility not open any possibilities whatsoever for social mobility. Not surprisingly, social defects of person tended to overlap with, or rather reinforce, social defects of action, or profession. Yet here too historians have come to realize that there was much inconsistency and selective application in practice, even in such supposedly clear-cut areas as the so-called dishonourable trades. Obviously this umbrella covered occupations working with dead bodies—executioners, butchers, tanners, knackers (charged with rounding up and killing stray dogs), gravediggers—but not necessarily mercenaries (who were nevertheless widely despised). Some people considered barbers, bath masters, and millers not quite respectable, but this never prevented anyone from seeking their professional services. Even categorizations supposedly based on notions of ritual purity—which would universally include privy cleaners and trash collectors—might or might not include shepherds, sow-gelders, and chimney sweeps.7 Social pollution itself was obviously an ancient concept, often based on fear of actual physical contamination as well as any symbolic tainting. Most people, for instance, carefully avoided physical contact with professional street beggars, the latter often visibly diseased or otherwise alarming. But since many respectable individuals were forced in hard times to do some begging, the practice itself was not in itself permanently shaming—at least not before the seventeenth century. Despite broad consensus in principle, the definition of both dishonour and its subset pollution often depended on the circumstances. Even the merry dishonourable—actors, acrobats, musicians, and puppeteers—were actually often sought out and enthusiastically received on the street (if not within the homes or families of the bourgeoisie).

Down but Not Out  105 In German lands, the inherent subjectivity and instability of social marginalization was in fact a point of great consternation among those individuals worried about their own declining status from the fifteenth century on. Preserving one’s own reputation was often perceived as a zero-sum game: someone else’s gain could mean your loss. “In an honor-based society,” the legal historian William Miller has observed, “there is no self-respect independent of the respect of others,” and thus every personal interaction remained fraught with the danger of lost honor, particularly in a public space, such as a tavern or a town square.8 Even in close quarters, the paramount importance of honour was so internalized that insults such as “rogue” (schelm) or “thief” frequently led to fistfights or even fatal stabbings. Any woman remained especially vulnerable to even more dishonourable characterization as a “whore” or “witch.” However defined, honour remained a precious commodity—to some more valuable than their very lives—and thus had to be defended at all costs, either in court or in private redress. In the countryside, small cottagers and farmers, caught between the expanding properties of their wealthier neighbours and the hordes of foreign vagrants, day labourers, and ex-mercenaries who roamed the roads, invariably focused their resentment on those below them on the social scale.9 Frequently reissued ordinances condemning the aggressiveness of “sturdy beggars” (starke Bettler) in particular underscored the popular perception that dishonour was as much a product of choice as of destiny. Work, in other words, remained the focus of social marginalization, but appearing “work shy” (arbeit scheu) became as damaging as untrained lowly, polluting labour. During the seventeenth century, the merging of these two categories of dishonour into a general heading of bad moral character grew even more pronounced, evident in popular and official complaints about members of “loose society” (lose Gesellschaft). Cities, of course, offered marginalized individuals greater hope for anonymity and “self-fashioning” than the average village or hamlet, but here too those hit worst by the economic downturn of the long sixteenth century— particularly artisans and small business owners—likewise turned their wrath against the so-called dishonourable in their midst. On a superficial level, a flurry of municipal sumptuary ordinances attempted to stymie social integration and mobility among the officially marginalized by fashion fiat. Not only were certain honourable accessories (jewellery, furs, ornate hats, pointy shoes) denied to the unworthy, but the same ordinances mandated officially stigmatizing markers of infamy: yellow stars for Jews, red boots for prostitutes, green sashes for executioners, and so on. Even the so-called deserving poor, those poor but upright householders fallen on hard times, were increasingly required to wear shameful alms badges throughout the day if they wished to continue receiving governmental assistance.10 At the same time, the first half of the early modern era witnessed the codification of many traditional legal restrictions of the dishonourable, including the inability to make a legal contract or will, testify in court, become a

106  Joel F. Harrington citizen, purchase land, and—of course—join a guild. Craft guilds remained the most notoriously restricted to all outsiders—increasingly more so over the course of the early modern era—but small and large businesses also held fast to many traditional definitions of “purity,” based on birth status.11 It is too early in Europe’s history to speak of social class but clearly the economic volatility of the area apparently reinvigorated and expanded definitions of honour, exacerbating an already rigid social hierarchy and making any improvement of an individual’s status ever more unlikely. But was it in fact the case that the structures of marginalization had so hardened during the early modern era as to become ossified? To what degree was individual social mobility still possible for the marginalized and what did it look like when it did happen? These are especially difficult questions to answer for the early modern period, since most upwardly mobile individuals were more likely to hide their lowly or dishonourable origins than to brag about them. Rags-to-riches anecdotes aside, there’s simply no reliable way to gauge how frequently this type of social mobility actually occurred. Instead I propose to focus on the dynamics of social mobility of marginal individuals, the way that such mobility might be attained within existing social constraints, and for this I turn to the example I know best. Frantz Schmidt, better known as Meister Frantz, was the full-time executioner of the German imperial city of Nuremberg from 1578 until 1618—an astonishingly successful career of forty years.12 Before that, he spent five years as a wandering journeyman, working at times for his father, Heinrich Schmidt, the executioner for the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg. Unlike most of the Schmidts’ fellow practitioners, we know quite a bit about their family’s entry into this particular odious profession, as well as Meister Frantz’s lifelong campaign to escape its infamy. The most remarkable source is a personal journal Schmidt kept, describing all of the executions and other punishments he administered from 1573 to 1618. My own recent biography of Meister Frantz makes extensive use of this document—and it is an incredible source—but on the subject of the Schmidt’s social mobility—first downward and then upward—the most relevant artefact is a petition for restitution of honour, sent by Meister Frantz, at the age of seventy, to Emperor Ferdinand II, in the year 1624.13 In it, Schmidt describes the circumstances of his father’s misfortune, his own attitude about having this unsavoury occupation thrust upon him, his aspirations for his own children, and evidence of the vast social network he had built up over the course of a half century in Nuremberg. Meister Frantz’s petition provides, in short, a rare and instructive glimpse into the real-world workings of social marginality during the early modern era. More broadly, the life trajectory of Frantz Schmidt provides a framework for viewing the possibilities and limitations of social mobility among those various individuals identified as “outcast” in some way. The “social capital” concepts of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu are especially useful in this respect, albeit in a generalized manner.14

Down but Not Out  107 Professional executioners, according to Werner Dankert, the doyen of German dishonourable studies, were the most dishonourable among all dishonourable people of the early modern era.15 Since the Middle Ages, they had been universally reviled as cold-blooded killers for pay and accordingly excluded from respectable society at every turn. Most were forced to live outside the city walls or near an already unclean location within the city, typically the slaughter-yard or a leprosarium. Their legal disenfranchisement was just as thorough: no executioner or family member could hold citizenship, be admitted to a guild, hold public office, serve as a legal guardian or trial witness, or even write a valid will. Until the late fifteenth century, they received no legal protection from mob violence in the event of a botched execution and a few were actually stoned to death by angry spectators. In most towns, hangmen—as they were most commonly known—were forbidden from entering a church and their participation in any of the sacraments depended on the willingness of a local priest to set foot in their residence, usually to baptize a child or (for Catholics) to administer last rites. They were also not supposed to come into bathhouses, taverns, or other public buildings, and entrance to the homes of respectable people was virtually unheard of. The pervasive fear of social contamination by the very touch of such individuals was so great that respectable individuals jeopardized their very livelihoods by even casual contact. Folklore abounded with tales of the disasters befalling those who broke the ancient taboo, and of beautiful condemned maidens who chose death over marriage to willing hangmen. The source of this deep anxiety seems obvious, given the distasteful nature of the hangman’s trade. Direct contact with dead bodies in itself—as already mentioned—carried a polluting stigma in many pre-industrial societies. Most people also considered hangmen a type of amoral mercenary and thus outside of “decent” society in the same manner as vagrants, prostitutes, and thieves, as well as Jews and Gypsies. Contemporaries and some modern scholars commonly supposed a still more damning unfree or criminal background among individuals attracted to such an unsavoury occupation in the first place—even though the historical evidence remains inconclusive on this point. Bastardy was likewise presumed among many socially marginalized in German lands, with the distinction between illegitimate (unehelich) and dishonourable (uhehrlich) often elided, so that even official documents might casually refer to “the whore’s son hangman.”16 In short, executioners represented virtually all forms of pre-modern dishonour rolled into one. The Schmidt family’s entrance into the profession of executioner had been relatively recent, Meister Frantz tells us, dating to an unfortunate event the year before his own birth.17 Following a disastrous siege of his home town of Hof, brought on by the equally disastrous expansionist campaign of its lord, Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, the citizens of Hof had to be forced to welcome their lord back into town. Aware that he was widely resented, Albrecht quickly uncovered an assassination plot against him and ordered the three perpetrators executed.

108  Joel F. Harrington Since Hof did not maintain a standing executioner, however, and since the impetuous margrave was eager to make a point, he ordered bystander Heinrich Schmidt (Frantz’s father) to hang the three would-be assassins. When Schmidt protested, Albrecht replied that if he refused, he himself would be ‘strung up’, together with the two men standing next to him. And upon Schmidt’s reluctant acceptance of the commission, he and his family were indeed thoroughly ostracized by their neighbours. Rather than relocate to another town, an obvious option, the former fowler decided to continue work as an executioner and make the best of a bad situation. Despite the social cost of Heinrich Schmidt’s decision, the timing was propitious from a career point of view, especially for his only son, Frantz, whom he would train in the art of the interrogative torture and criminal execution. The second half of the sixteenth century was the golden age of the executioner in Germany, spawned by the greater hegemonic ambitions of many state builders as well as the popular reception of Emperor Charles V’s new criminal code, known as the Carolina.18 Like other servants of the early modern state—military leaders, scribes, jurists—skilled executioners were much in demand and could command impressive salaries. The job opportunities generated by governmental expansion in turn allowed a certain degree of social mobility, even for marginalized individuals such as soldiers and executioners who possessed a high degree of expertise and reliability, what Bourdieu would call cultural capital. Again, Meister Frantz’s own social mobility would not have been possible just a few generations earlier, before the imperatives of state building overrode popular disgust and prejudice. Moreover, unlike jurists, physicians, and ministers, Meister Frantz’s own particular expertise was not learned at the university, which was out of reach for the socially marginalized. The business world perhaps offered some opportunities to disadvantaged individuals, but only those few who had been fortunate to receive some rudimentary education as well as gain entry without a formal apprenticeship— also off-limits to the dishonourable. Only the military offered the same possibility of advancement without education or personal contacts as law enforcement, with a model of cultural capital based principally on professional performance. The accumulation of private property, or economic capital, was typically a by-product of cultural capital, and in Frantz’s Schmidt’s case this began early in life. The financial package that young Frantz secured in his initial five-year contract with Nuremberg was spectacular by the standards of the day. In addition to a weekly salary of 2 ½ gulden (130 fl. annually), he was assured free lodging (with his own heated bath) in a spacious 1500 m2 house, a weekly supply of wine and firewood, reimbursement for travel and all other job-related expenses, and lifelong tax-free status. He was also to be paid one Thaler (.85 fl.) per interrogation session and was permitted to earn supplemental income as both a visiting executioner (with the council’s approval) and a medical consultant. His base salary alone put him in

Down but Not Out  109 the top 5 per cent bracket of the general population and was 60 per cent higher than his Munich counterpart, making him probably the best-paid executioner in the empire and on a par with several medical and legal professionals. Closer to home, he would earn two to three times as much annually as his own father in Bamberg.19 And this doesn’t even take into account his annual income from medical consultations, which was at least as much as his executioner wages. How did a twenty-four-year-old journeyman—albeit one with impressive credentials for his age—achieve such a coup? Here we come to the third and most important factor in his success: public propriety, or what Bourdieu famously called social capital. Nuremberg’s leaders were obviously attracted by Frantz’s professional experience and expertise, but it was his reputation for reliability and sobriety (literally, he was a teetotaler), combined with his youth, that likely clinched the offer. Sixteenth-century executioners were not known for their longevity in office, usually owing to violent dispositions or physical infirmity. Among Frantz’s predecessors in Nuremberg, one was executed for treason by his own assistant, another was dismissed after killing his assistant in a dispute over wages, a third was killed in an ambush, a fourth transferred after nearly stabbing a knacker’s wife to death, and two others—including Frantz’s own predecessor—were forced to retire because of old age and fatal illnesses.20 A young yet accomplished and apparently pious professional promised the stability and seriousness that the office of executioner had hitherto been lacking. Familial networking also played a crucial role. Initially, Frantz benefited most directly from his father’s skilful political manoeuvring in getting his son hired in the first place. Heinrich Schmidt had early on identified the job of Nuremberg’s executioner as a plum position, perhaps the most prestigious in the empire and thus the most promising for restoration of their family’s honour. His own repeated attempts to get hired there were unsuccessful, though, so undeterred, father and son managed to turn this disappointment to their advantage. Within a year of the 1567 appointment of Lienhard Lippert as Nuremberg’s new executioner, Lippert asked the council for permission to marry his housekeeper, who happened to be Frantz’s sister, Kunigunda. Exactly when and how this strategic placement occurred is not recorded but such a fortuitous development was surely not unanticipated by the Schmidts. At some point within the next year and a half, Lippert and Kunigunda Schmidin were privately wed in October 1568, the bride gave birth to the first of seven children.21 His family connection to the coveted Nuremberg position secure, the eager, young journeyman knowingly exploited the contrast that he presented to his allegedly dissolute and unreliable brother-in-law. Determined to avoid more turnover in the position, Nuremberg’s councillors long tolerated both Lippert’s personal and professional shortcomings, but his sudden (and unapproved) two-week trip to ‘his father-in-law in Bamberg’ in January 1577, required the council to hire his kinsman, the foreign executioner, for the

110  Joel F. Harrington hanging of thief Hans Weber.22 Was this opportunity also engineered by Heinrich Schmidt? In any event, the result was, Frantz later wrote in his journal, ‘my first execution on here’. Over the following sixteen months, the new, young executioner dispatched seven more poor sinners on behalf of the city of Nuremberg, all without incident—‘very well’, according to the court notary—but still on an ad hoc, fee basis.23 Finally presented with an attractive alternative to the troublesome Lippert, city councillors grew less tenuous in their admonishments of the older executioner, warning him that ‘if he didn’t amend his laziness and disorderly life, he would be replaced with another master’. Thus, on 25 April 1578, when Lippert informed his superiors that he was too ill to go on, they immediately accepted his resignation, denied his requests for a pension or housing assistance, and unceremoniously washed their hands of the twelve-year veteran—who died less than a month later. That same day, they appointed a new master executioner, ‘Frantz Schmidt of Hof’.24 His carefully engineered family connections had obviously got him a foot in the door, but Frantz made the most of his temporary assignments in Nuremberg, impressing observers with his skill and poise, while ingratiating himself with legal superiors during his brief encounters with them. The remainder of Schmidt’s long career—forty more years as an executioner and fifteen after that as a practicing healer—was built on the same foundation of inspiring confidence in his employers and Nuremberg’s populace by his calm and reliable professional performance, his scrupulous avoidance of any scandalous behaviour, his emerging identity as a Hausvater of seven children, and his own citizenship—unprecedented for an executioner in Nuremberg—attained at the age of 39 in 1593.25 His successful medical practice likewise thrived in part because of his ability to avoid conflicts with local barber-surgeons and physicians, while cultivating his support among his patrician backers. Meister Frantz’s life provided a model of propriety that his successors in Nuremberg found nearly impossible to live up to. So what was the ultimate result of Frantz Schmidt’s successful lifelong accumulation of cultural capital, economic capital, and social capital? On 4 July 1618, at the age of 64, Meister Frantz became ill and five weeks later retired from the position he had held for more than forty years.26 Whatever the precise nature of the illness, it was apparently not debilitating, since he not only continue to work regularly as a medical consultant but would also live another sixteen years, dying in the midst of a city-wide plague epidemic at the age of 80. During the years following his retirement as executioner, Schmidt focused on consolidating his gains for his four surviving adult children and one granddaughter. The full extent of his savings and investments is not clear: he claimed to only be receiving 30 fl. or so in interest annually (implying investments worth around 600 fl.), but this was in a plea to the city council for their assistance in his purchase of a 3000 fl. house, which required a large down payment. As usual, he was successful in his negotiations with his former employers, who declined to inquire about his annual

Down but Not Out  111 income from consultations, which was easily as much as his former salary. Shortly thereafter—six years after his retirement—the entire Schmidt household finally relocated to a new home.27 Just as significantly, at the same time, Meister Frantz submitted his petition to Emperor Ferdinand II for formal restitution of his family’s honour.28 The document, still extant, contains the most introspective and personally revealing lines he ever wrote about his experience of the deep shame brought on his entire family by his father’s forced execution. Just as unfair, ‘and as much as I would have liked to shake free of it’, he acknowledges that he himself was forced into the office of executioner—contrary to his own natural calling to medicine. ‘Almost every person’, the retired executioner writes, ‘has an enduring inclination towards a certain thing, through which he earns a living’. This is the vocation he has practiced for forty-six years, ‘next to my difficult profession, helping with my healing over fifteen thousand people in Nuremberg and the surrounding lands—with the help of the most high and eternal God’. Healing dangerous injuries and physical illnesses is also the trade he has taught to his own children, ‘out of true paternal responsibility with good discipline . . . just as my father taught me, despite the difficult and universally despised office forced upon both of us’. He has always applied his medicinal learning ‘in useful and honourable ways’, including the healing of certain highly placed imperial representatives, whom he names, and nearly fifty noble and patrician clients, all listed in an appendix. Only then does Meister Frantz return to his forty years of service to the emperor and his Nuremberg representatives in the role of executioner, ‘which I undertook and administered without the slightest concern for the danger to my life. During that entire time, there were no complaints about me or my executions and I voluntarily left office about six years ago on good terms, on account of my age and infirmity’. An attached recommendation from the Nuremberg city council confirms that Schmidt was ‘well-known for his calm, retiring life and behaviour as well as his thriving medical practice . . . and enforcement of imperial law’. In consideration of his many years of service in to both public order and healing, as well as his thirty-one years as a Nuremberg citizen, Frantz Schmidt closes by asking for the restoration of his family name, which will finally lift the stigma he has known all of his life and open all honourable professions to his own sons. An ornately inscribed and wax-sealed reply from the imperial court in Vienna arrived after only three months. Following a lengthy reiteration of his request, the document culminated in the words Frantz had longed to hear his entire life: On account of the subservient petition to us from the highly esteemed mayor and council of the city of Nuremberg, the inherited shame of Franz Schmidt that prevents him and his heirs from being considered upright or presents other barriers is, out of imperial might and clemency,

112  Joel F. Harrington hereby abolished and dissolved and his honourable status among other reputable people declared and restored.29 Little matter that the decision was apparently less influenced by the executioner’s heartfelt plea or his long service than by the dignitaries in his corner: Meister Frantz knew the ways of his birth-obsessed society. He had achieved his goal, transforming his father’s dishonour into his sons’ honour. It was not the executioner’s sword that he would pass on to them but the physicians’ scalpel. Sadly, Frantz Schmidt’s remarkable achievement did not in fact translate into the enduring success he had imagined. His sole grandchild and two of his adult children died before he did; the remaining two offspring never married, each dying at an advanced age in the large family home their father had bought after his retirement. Frantzenhans, the sole surviving son, attempted to continue his father’s medical practice during those years but was regularly stymied by his father’s successor (and medical competitor) as well as the local barber-surgeons. Just two generations later, medical faculties in France and Germany would begin matriculating sons of executioners but this type of mobility remained impossible during Frantzenhans’s day. The only monument to the executioner’s achievement that remains is his own tombstone, with the still legible inscription “Honourable Frantz Schmidt, physician of Obere Wöhrdstrasse”—with no mention whatsoever of the infamy that had been his inheritance and lifelong bane.30 Meister Frantz’s bittersweet tale provides a useful illustration of the possibilities and limitations of social mobility among the dishonourable of early modern Europe. His own skills—both as a professional and as a networker—enabled him to achieve stunning financial compensation for life, citizenship in one of the most prestigious cities in Europe, a large and thriving household, and even some modicum of respect among his superiors and neighbours. He was also fortunate in the timing of high demand for skilled executioners—the seventeenth century saw a decline in both demand and wages. Like many people of the day, he and his father made strategic use of marriage—particular the union of his sister to his predecessor—and were very good at pleasing their superiors. Late in life, he was able to leverage these successes into the greatest achievement of all—restitution of his family honour—and thus die a vindicated man. At the same time, the cultural marginality of his profession remained firmly entrenched. He was unable, for instance, to overcome the pervasive informal stigma that banned him from all public events and private homes alike, or prevent such informal restrictions from plaguing his own sons, despite their formally restored respectability. His achievements, in other words, were extremely slow in coming, hard-won, and very difficult to pass on. Ambitious marginalized individuals like Frantz Schmidt did the best they could with the cards they were dealt, but the game remained rigged against them (cf. the Las Vegas dictum: ‘The house always wins’). Certainly

Down but Not Out  113 some remarkable contemporaries, such as the poor shepherd Thomas Platter,31 were able to consolidate their gains for their progeny, but the stain of the executioner proved a particularly resistant form of dishonour. Perhaps the best illustration of the persistently liminal nature of Frantz Schmidt’s reputation (and thus social status) is the very geography of his long life. Unlike most German executioners, who were forced to reside outside the city walls, Meister Frantz was permitted to live in the heart of the city, albeit in a distinctive location. The ‘Hangman’s House’ that came with his position in Nuremberg was situated on an island in the Pegnitz (today’s Trödelmarkt), immediately adjacent to a (dishonourable) pig market. It was not the still more dishonourable site of executions, which lay just outside the city’s south-east walls. The necessary role that the marginalized executioner played in Nuremberg’s society instead permitted an island of dishonour within the city, akin to the Jewish ghetto near the main marketplace (before the group’s 1498 expulsion) or the municipal brothel about 500 meters south of the Hangman’s House (before its closure in 1562). On the island’s north shore, connected by a bridge lay an also polluted prison, often used to house the dangerously insane. By contrast, on the south shore, the still extant ‘Hangman’s Bridge’ (Henkersteg) connected the dishonourable island to a respectable, bourgeois neighbourhood that included (fittingly) the large house that Schmidt bought upon retirement, having his honour officially restored (at age 70). Most paradoxically, thousands of people who would never touch an executioner, let alone welcome him into their homes, regularly entered Schmidt’s executioner house to be healed by him. In keeping with the simultaneous insider-outsider status of its chief resident, the island of the Hangman’s House in fact represented a grey zone, interpreted by honourable people as it suited their needs. Given the complexity of the topic and the brevity of this example, two very general observations about the very definition of early modern marginality will serve as a conclusion. First, we should not overestimate the impact of formal exclusion of marginalized individuals and groups. Guilds, citizenship, and other economic and legal prerogatives undeniably became more restricted for everyone over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including propertied, respectable, seemingly pious individuals. Yet these formal impediments did not prevent many ‘dishonourable’ individuals like Meister Frantz from accumulating property and power in various ways by exploiting their own cultural, social, and economic capital. Statutes and mandates attempting to formalize social exclusion should likewise be viewed with great caution. Frequent re-issuances of the same sumptuary ordinances over the course of a few generations strongly suggest that such rigid definitions of marginalization were in fact popularly ignored, particularly in the instance of well-liked, or at least well-respected, dishonourable individuals such as Frantz Schmidt. Of course the same might be said of anti-discrimination laws, well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which brings us to a second

114  Joel F. Harrington observation. We should not underestimate the impact of informal exclusion, especially within closed geographical and cultural spaces. Professional and other group systems of dispositions (or habitus in Bourdieu-speak) evolved very slowly. The selective interpretation of social marginalization ultimately benefited Meister Frantz in his attempt to build a respectable reputation and regain his family’s honour from the emperor. That selectivity, however, usually did not work in favour of the marginalized, and there is no clear, linear decline of social dishonour, even after the various legal ‘liberations’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Birth, honour, and reputation remained precious commodities and often exerted an influence independent of material success. In other words, it was easiest for an individual such as Meister Frantz to attain wealth, somewhat more difficult to enhance his legal status, and most difficult of all to gain full social acceptance. Even more crucially, all of these gains—particularly the last, respectability—were very difficult to consolidate and pass on to offspring, at least within the first generation or two. Long after the economic or legal hardships of social marginalization passed, the stain on a family’s name might result in other, less monumental difficulties, ranging from casual insult to indirect forms of social exclusion. Even a consummate manipulator of the system, such as Schmidt, could more easily influence his superiors than his neighbours. Social marginalization thus appears innate to the human condition but also highly malleable in form and intensity. Perhaps this is what Shakespeare had in mind when he called honour an empty word—open to multiple meanings, rather than firm or even tangible. Still, the power of a few such words to shape personal destiny is undeniable. Anti-discrimination and slander laws clearly remain essential in civilized societies today, although historical experience also teaches how easily such laws can be circumvented by entrenched, popular prejudices. In that respect, modern democratic governments seeking to secure legal equality have something in common with early modern governments seeking to enforce social discrimination: laws are often better indicators of official anxieties than popular sentiments. More importantly, the success of the former ultimately depends on the latter much more than authorities from either era would care to admit.

Notes 1 Pitrim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Mobility (1927; reprint: New York, 1959). 2 See especially Winfried Schulze, ‘Die ständische Gesellschaft des 16./17. Jahrhunderts als Problem von Statik und Dynamik’ in Winfried Schulze (ed.), Ständische Gesellschaft und soziale Mobilität (Munich, 1988), pp. 1–18. 3 Paul Münch, ‘Grundwerte der frühneuzeitlichen Ständegesellschaft. Aufriß einer vernachlässigten Thematik’ in Ibid., especially pp. 66–72. 4 See especially Werner Danckert, Unehrliche Leute. Die verfemten Berufe, Sec. Ed. (Bern, 1979); also Richard van Dülmen, ‘Der Infame Mensch’ in Richard van Dülmen (ed.), Arbeit, Frömigkeit und Eigensinn (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), pp. 106–40; Ernst Schubert, ‘Mobilität ohne Chance: Die Ausgrenzung

Down but Not Out  115 des fahrenden Volkes’ in Schulze (ed.), Ständische Gesellschaft, pp. 113–64; Franz Irsigler and Arnold Lassotta, Bettler und Gaukler, Dirnen und Henker. Außenseiter in einer mittelalterlichen Stadt (Munich, 1984). 5 For an overview on the stigma of early modern illegitimacy, see Michael Mitterauer, Ledige Mütter. Zur Geschichte unehelicher Geburten in Europa (Munich, 1983), pp. 14–16; also Susanna Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheiten, Orte der Unzucht. Ehe und Sexualität in Basel während der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn, 1999), pp. 237–54. 6 Maria R. Boes, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany: Courts and Adjudicatory Practices in Frankfurt am Main, 1562–1696 (Farnham, 2013), pp. 71–112. 7 Jutta Nowosadtko, Scharfrichter und Abdecker. Der Alltag zweier‘ unehrlicher Berufen’ in der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn, 1994), pp. 12–13, 24–8; Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge and New York, 1999), pp. 3–6. 8 William Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca NY, 1995), p. 16. 9 The best introductory survey of the sprawling literature on this subject is Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994). See also the magisterial Owen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 1ff, on the historiographical problems of tracking and understanding the largely invisible poor of this period. On the verschämte poor and their special status, see Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 39–41. 10 Albrecht Keller, Der Scharfrichter in der deutschen Kulturgeschichte (Bonn, 1921), pp. 79–81, 121–22; Nowosadkto, Scharfrichter and Abdecker, pp. 239– 48; Jütte, Poverty and Deviance, pp. 100–42. 11 Here too, Stuart, Defiled Trades, passim, provides the best overview of competing notions of ‘dishonour’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. 12 Much that follows draws on my findings in The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honour and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century (London, 2013). 13 Haus-, Hof-, Staatsarchiv Wien, Restitutionen, Fasz 6/S Franz Schmidt, 1624 (hereafter referred to as Restitution). 14 The most succinct overview on this subject is Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’ in J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York, 1986), pp. 241–58. 15 Danckert, Unehrliche Leute, pp. 23–5. 16 ‘Der Hurenson der Hencker’ in 1276 Augsburg Stadtrecht, cited in Keller, Scharfrichter, p. 108. See also the discussion in Else Angstmann, Der Henker in der Volksmeinung. Seine Namen und sein Vorkommen in der mündlichen Volksüberlieferung (Bonn, 1928), pp. 74–113; Nowosadtko, Scharfrichter und Abdecker, pp. 21–36, and Johann Glenzdorf and Fritz Treichel, Henker, Schinder, und arme Sünder (Bad Münder am Deister, 1970) I: 14, pp. 38–9. 17 Restitution, 201r-v. 18 See Harrington, Faithful Executioner, pp. 28–32. 19 Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Rep. 60 a, Ratsverläße (hereafter RV): 1422: 68r (29 April 1578); Staatsarchiv Bamberg A 231/1, Nr 1797/1. 20 RV 1119: 9v, 11v, 12r, 17r-v, 18r, 20r (13–15 November 1554). 21 RV 1264: 17v (28 June 1566); RV 1268: 8v (10 October 1566); RV 1274: 2r (14 April 1567); RV 1275: 14r (14 April 1567); RV 1280: 24r (10 September 1567); RV 1280: 25v (12 September 1567). 22 RV 1405: 24v (14 January 1577). 23 Staatsarchiv Nürnberg 52b 222; 75v (23 October 1577).

116  Joel F. Harrington 24 RV 1421: 58r-v (25 April 1578), 68r (29 April 1578). 25 See Harrington, Faithful Executioner, pp. 131–36. 26 RV 1943: 37v, 58r, 80r, 85r-v (13, 17, 24, 27 June 1618); 1953: 10v, 41r, 47r (1, 10, 12 August 1618). 27 RV 2044: 29r-v, 64r-v (23 June and 4 July 1625); 2045: 13r-v, 41r-v, 71v (18 and 26 July, 3 August 1625); 2047: 16r (13 September 1625); 2048: 1v (6 October 1625); Stadtarchiv Nürnberg B 14/1 138, 108v–110r. 28 The following quotations are from Restitution, 209r–211r. 29 Restitution, 211r. 30 See Harrington, Faithful Executioner, pp. 218–29. 31 The best account of the Platter family’s collective success is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga (Chicago IL and London, 1997).

7 The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain Carmen Fracchia

On 19 March 1650, Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) exhibited an unusual portrait in Rome. It depicted his slave, the painter Juan de Pareja (c. 1606– 1670).1 This work was highly praised and its reception was extremely successful due to the realistic likeness of the sitter, as the art critic and painter Antonio Palomino recorded in his Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale (1724): [Velázquez] made [the portrait] . . . of Juan de Pareja, his slave and a painter himself, with such likeness and liveliness that when he sent it with Pareja for the criticism of some friends, they stood looking at the painted portrait and the model with admiration and amazement, not knowing which one they should speak to and which was to answer them. Of this portrait (which is half-length, from life) a story is related by Andreas Schmidt, a Flemish painter now at the Spanish court, who was in Rome at the time. In accordance with the custom of decorating the cloister of the Rotunda (where Raphael of Urbino is buried) on Saint Joseph’s day [19 March], with famous paintings, ancient and modern, this portrait was exhibited. It gained such universal applause that in the opinion of all the painters of the different nations everything else seemed like painting but this alone like truth. In view of this Velázquez was received as Roman Academician in the year 1650.2 At the time, Velázquez was the Spanish court artist in post-Tridentine Rome. His selection of a mixed-race Spanish subject is notable because the depiction of black Africans is rare in early modern Spanish art. This makes the decision to display such an image in Counter-Reformation Rome all the more intriguing. This essay will use Pareja’s portrait by Velázquez, as well as the former’s own artistic production, as a starting point for exploring the place of African slaves in early modern Spain. It will explore the relationship between the presence of slaves within early modern Spanish society (particularly Seville) and their representation in Spanish visual culture. In so doing, it will contribute to the discussion of meanings and manifestations of marginality in relation to space and culture. In the first section, changing

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Figure 7.1 Diego Velázquez, Juan de Pareja, 1650. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Fletcher and Rogers Funds, and Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Grot (1876–1967), by exchange, supplemented by gifts from friends of the Museum, 1971 (1971.86). www.metmuseum.org

religious concepts of slavery will be outlined. In the second part, the spaces occupied by slaves in early modern Seville will be highlighted, including those belonging to the city’s black confraternities. In the third section, the oeuvre of both Velázquez and Pareja will be examined against the backdrop of the broader religious, social and spatial context of early modern Seville.

I  Concepts of Slavery In early modern Spain, Africans were conceptualized and discussed as naturally subhuman beings, lacking agency and the ‘chattel property of another man or woman, and thus subject to sell’.3 The slave’s will was subject to the owner’s authority and this condition was reinforced by the practice of painful and systematic corporal punishment. Slaves were commodities and they provided free labour in the emerging capitalist society of imperial Spain.4 Most Spanish intellectuals and theologians accepted slavery as a natural

The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain  119 phenomenon and a constituent part of the social order. The causes and justification of this human transaction were found in the Aristotelian concept of natural slavery, which was transformed in medieval times into a doctrine that justified slavery by placing its origin in the existence of sin and war.5 In the sixteenth century, Dominicans, Jesuits and Capuchins followed the same lines and agreed on the legitimization of slavery through war and heredity with the result that slavery was seen as necessary for domestic purposes.6 In 1573, in his Art of Contracts, the Dominican lawyer Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz claimed that Christianity could not justify the violence of the slave trade. However, most Spanish and Portuguese intellectuals followed the thought of the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina in his Of Justice and Law (1614). He identified the conversion of infidels as the only benefit of slavery.7 The Counter-Reformation promoted an interest in the Christianization of African slaves with the implementation of baptism and the learning of the catechism. This was particularly endorsed by the archbishop of Seville, Pedro de Castro y Quiñones, in his Instructions for Remedying and Ensuring that None of the Blacks Is Lacking in Sacred Baptism (1614) and by the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval in his Treatise on Slavery (1627). The latter claimed that blackness can be removed by baptism, a sacrament intended for the inner whitening of all humans: ‘although they [slaves] are black to the eye, they can have the innocence and whiteness that Christ’s blood gives to one who is washed in it’.8 Other religious orders—Franciscans and Benedictines—also exercised a major influence in the implementation of the evangelical role of the Catholic Church that had been reinforced by the Council of Trent (1545–63). A correlation between ‘blackness’ and unorthodox Christianity was reinforced by the permanent tribunal of the Inquisition, which had its seat from 1480 in Seville. The Inquisition defended the purity of the Catholic faith that, in law, was equated, after the middle of the sixteenth century, with purity of lineage or blood.9 The main targets of the Inquisition were the ‘new Christians’ who ‘were suspected of having covertly returned to their old beliefs’: Muslims and Jews converted to Christianity—Moriscos and Conversos—and also the marginal and the foreign, including Afro-Hispanic slaves and freedmen and women.10 The word ‘black’ (negro) or ‘African’ most often signified ‘slave’, whether people from Sub-Saharan Africa, Berbers or Iberian Muslims. Thus, in early modern Spain, the word ‘black’, and the physical appearance of blackness, was a signifier of the specific social condition of slavery.11 This ideological association made the existence and life of freedmen and women extremely difficult because they ‘were fatally stigmatized by their past’. Slaves were also mostly branded: the most common brand was an S and a line (clavo), standing for ‘slave’ (esclavo).12 It was ‘a kind of insurance’ and later became a method of punishment for runaway slaves. The status of emancipated slaves was not the same as ‘that of a free born person in early modern Spain’, as Martín Casares shows by analyzing a series of documents in which the previous condition of manumitted slaves is always recorded.13

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II  The Place of Slaves in Early Modern Spanish Society There was a considerable early modern presence of black slaves in Spanish urban centres. In Seville, slaves accounted for approximately ten per cent of the population in 1565, which led contemporary commentators to compare this cosmopolitan city to a ‘giant chessboard containing an equal number of white and black chessmen’.14 Seville’s slave community was the largest of the Spanish kingdoms. It also became, with Lisbon and Valencia, the main centre for the slave trade in the Iberian Peninsula. Slavery was a profitable business in this important Spanish port. The price of a slave, which depended on the person’s physical condition, age and sex, rose at the height of the Iberian transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century; most commonly the slaves were aged between twenty and forty.15 Slave trade licences were created by the crowns of Castile and Aragon and granted by the House of Trade and the Council of the Indies, which was established in Seville from the beginning of the sixteenth century.16 The slave-traders, who were Sevillians, Portuguese, Genoese, Florentines, Catalans, Germans, French, and English, exported many of the slaves to the rest of the Peninsula and to the New World.17 A significant number, however, remained in the city. Spanish slave owners most often belonged to the monarchy, aristocracy, religious orders, the higher clergy (including the Archbishop of Seville), and the wealthy merchant class. Owners were also professionals, artisans and labourers, since most people could afford to have at least one slave. The upper echelons of society purchased slaves through intermediaries, whereas the rest of the social strata—such as lawyers, physicians, notaries, traders, conquistadors, sea captains, merchants, tailors, shoemakers, and builders— dealt with the transaction directly, as documents of sale, purchase, donation, declaration of escape, and manumission of slaves testify. Slaves were not only owned by individuals but also by institutions. Hospitals, monasteries and cloistered nuns mainly acquired slaves through donations.18 The latter institutions also obtained their respective male and female slaves through inheritance from the families of friars and nuns, or else through sale and purchase from the priors. Given that slave ownership was fairly widespread within society, this essay will explore the visibility of these slaves from a number of perspectives: visibility at the point of sale, work, domestic arrangements and religious life. The monopoly of the slave trade with the Portuguese since the fifteenth century and the subsequent high concentration of African slaves in urban Spain created specific social conditions, such as the clear demarcation between slaves and servants.19 The crucial difference was that the latter were never captured in wars or auctioned. Most black Africans were captured by the Spaniards, and particularly by the Portuguese, in present-day Guinea-Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Senegal, Gambia, part of Mali, and part of Burkina.20 The enslaved Africans were then transported to Seville to be sold at auctions held in the most important spaces for the city’s administrative

The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain  121 and economic life.21 In the square of San Francisco and near the banks, on the steps of the cathedral, slaves were sold with other precious commodities: ‘jewellery, gold and silver objects, rich tapestries, arms and slaves are sold in the continuous auctions that take place here [at the cathedral steps] throughout the day’.22 From the end of the fourteenth century slavery was, as Antonio Domínguez Ortiz states, ‘essentially an urban and domestic phenomenon’, which explains why black women usually attracted higher prices. The great majority of female slaves worked as domestic servants and were confined to the most menial tasks in the kitchen.23 They accompanied their mistresses to public places, served as wet nurses and took care of their master’s children. Slave owners also occasionally forced their slaves into prostitution. The relationship they shared with their masters was often ambiguous and complex. The sexual exploitation of female slaves and servants by their masters was widespread. In fact, during the sixteenth century between eighty per cent and ninety per cent of black women were not married but had one or two children, and most mixed-race children were born from a female black slave and a male white Christian.24 Most slaves in general worked in the kitchen, in the laundry, cared for horses and mules in the stables, and worked as attendants to adults, doorkeepers, porters, waiters, and valets. Their masters also took their male slaves with them during their daily activities or as their escort on foot if they were riding. Enslaved men in urban households were most commonly employed as carriers, watersellers, or errand boys.25 Slaves who worked outside the domestic environment to support their masters did not reside in their owners’ homes. In Seville, they mainly lived in the poorer quarter of San Bernardo, outside the city walls, with other working people, such as bakers, gardeners and employees of the slaughterhouse.26 Slaves also lived in the suburb of Triana, on the southern side of the city across the river Guadalquivir, where Gypsies had been separated from the rest of the city since their arrival at the beginning of the fifteenth century.27 Most convicted galley slaves were gathered in the Arenal, the port of the city. Other marginal subjects were also concentrated outside the city walls: lepers were interned in the hospital outside the Gate of the Macarena, founded after the Reconquest, and nearby the blind and the mad were kept in the hospital of San Gil, erected in the fourteenth century.28 Moriscos in contrast were admitted within the city walls, mainly in the district of San Marcos until their permanent expulsion from Spain between 1609 and 1614. In other slave cities in the crown of Castile, the poor were also relegated to peripheral districts; the exception was Valladolid, where they were concentrated in ‘central parishes’.29 Slaves and freed slaves who were not in domestic service were part of the city’s large unskilled workforce. In Seville, they were mainly employed in lowly tasks in the public granary, and in soap factories in the Triana district. They also worked as porters, chairmen or street vendors of water, fireworks, fish, and vinegar.30 Freed slaves found temporary employers in

122  Carmen Fracchia the main squares or public spaces of urban centres and they worked as carriers, diggers, paviers, casters in foundries, builders, tile makers, bakers and butchers. The latter generally served also as executioners.31 Manumitted women had less opportunity to find paid jobs; therefore they mostly married to become housewives. Slave owners mainly opposed the marriage of their female slaves especially if their husbands were freedmen and could therefore buy their wives’ freedom. Slave masters would occasionally provide their emancipated female slaves with ‘a few goods as dowry’ so that they could get married. Freedwomen are recorded working in taverns and inns or earning their living as sorceresses, which involved ‘making love filters, finding lost objects’ and ‘curing illnesses with herbal remedies’.32 Urban slaves and ex-slaves suffered a series of social restrictions: only a limited number of them could gather in ‘taverns, inns, and cheap restaurants’ and they were not allowed to carry arms unless ‘in the performance of their regular duties’ or when they were with their masters.33 They were also excluded, together with a significant sector of the population—‘Jews, Moors, Indians, mulattos, and slaves’—from membership of the city’s guilds.34 However, in Seville and Granada, the two cities with the highest concentration of slaves in early modern Spain, slaves and freedmen trained as craftsmen in the owners’ shops, such as printing houses or artistic workshops. Their exclusion from religious confraternities, which in Spain ‘tend to be independent from guild sponsorship’,35 partly prompted the foundation of exclusively ‘black’ confraternities.36 These institutions provided an opportunity for the support and representation of Africans within the city. The confraternities were intended to control the social behaviour of the enslaved and freed Afro-Hispanic population, and were another specific outcome of the transatlantic slave trade in early modern Spain. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ‘ethnic’ brotherhoods and those of the nobility, like the Confraternity of Santa Caridad (Holy Charity) that clearly specified that their members should be Old Christians ‘of clean and honest generation’ in their 1661 regulation, were socially and ethnically exclusive while most confraternities with members outside these categories were socially mixed and inclusive.37 The oldest black confraternity of Our Lady of the Kings was founded by Cardinal-Archbishop Gonzalo de Mena y Roelas of Seville (1394–1401) in the last decade of the fourteenth century.38 The aims were to run the househospital that was founded at the same time for the black population (especially for the sick and the disabled), to offer decent burials for their dead and support for widows.39 On 8 November 1475, owing to the increase of the black population in Seville, the Catholic Monarchs nominated their royal servant Juan de Valladolid as the first steward of black and mixed-race slaves and freed slaves. According to Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga (1677), Juan de Valladolid was an African of noble descent and a servant in the royal chambers.40 In fact, he was also known as the ‘negro count’ and his presence has been immortalized in the name of the Conde Negro Street that still exists today behind the confraternity’s chapel.41 His main duties were to represent

The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain  123 the Afro-Hispanic population and to organize their fiestas, processions, and weddings, since slaves and freed slaves were also employed as musicians and dancers at private and public celebrations.42 In 1504, Juan de Castillo was the first designated confraternity leader elected and defined as the ‘king of blacks’.43 This black confraternity was poorer than the more traditional wealthy brotherhoods run by the nobility, but rich individuals helped financially, such as the duke of Medina Sidonia in 1463.44 The key source of funding was donations in wills of money, properties or belongings. This income enabled members of the confraternity to hire white priests to celebrate mass and perform the sacraments, to maintain and commission devotional images and altars and to meet the confraternity’s charitable aims.45 The confraternity paid rent for almost three centuries to the marquis of Castellón and, from 1722, to the convent of San Agustín.46 In the middle of the sixteenth century, the confraternity and househospital of Our Lady of the Kings changed their name into Our Lady of the Angels and from 1784 to date, is known as the Confraternity of ‘little blacks’.47 It had been created in the parish of San Bernardo, where most black people lived. On 11 December 1573, the dean and the chapter of the cathedral of Seville designated the chapel of the hospital of the black confraternity as the new parish of San Bernardo and nominated the priest, Hernando de Aldana, and a sacristan to administer the sacraments.48 In 1587, Our Lady of the Angels, a Marian devotional brotherhood, merged with the black confraternity of Our Lady of Piety, a penitential group. The latter had been founded in 1554 in the chapel of the hospital of St Antony Abbot, a third-century African saint born in Egypt. The new black brotherhood adopted the name of Our Lady of the Angels and the penitential nature of Our Lady of Piety, which allowed their members to participate as equals in the city’s religious celebrations and in the Holy Week processions with the rest of the city’s confraternities, of which there were around forty by 1602.49 A proliferation of penitential confraternities in Spain took place after the reforms initiated by the Council of Trent. It decreed that all slaves and those ‘sent to the New World be Christians’ and this evangelical mission was partly fulfilled by the creation of exclusively black confraternities by the Crown and the Church.50 The last Tridentine sessions in 1562 and 1563 passed legislation to inspect the religious and financial activities of the confraternities.51 This included ensuring the suitable decorum of religious images to move the viewer to prayer. The most venerated images in Our Lady of the Angels were the three sculptures of their patron figure, Christ on the Cross, and St Benedict the Moor of Palermo, the first black European saint.52 He was a black slave and a Franciscan lay brother from Spanish Sicily (1526–89), the son of Christianized African slaves and known during his lifetime as ‘The Holy Black’. Although he was only beatified in 1743 and canonized in 1807, soon after his death and particularly after the arrival of his relics in the Spanish kingdoms in 1606, he was adopted as the patron saint of black slaves in Spain, Portugal and the New World. In 1611, his body was reinterred in Rome in a ‘costly silver casket donated

124  Carmen Fracchia by King Philip III of Spain’.53 The creation of new cults of the saints in Counter-Reformation Spain consolidated doctrinal points, such as the effectiveness of the sacraments and the veneration of relics, against the Protestants. The main aim was the ‘suppression of heterodoxy,’ and they were regarded ‘as the resident patrons of their communities’.54 The cult of saints became inseparable from the liturgy and feasts of saints and it gave a sense of social continuity and corporal identity to members of the same confraternity.55 By 1627, Archbishop Sandoval was already promoting the images of ‘Ethiopian saints’, like Antonio and Benedict of Palermo and Princess St Iphigenia, as ‘model[s] of black sanctity’.56 The governing board of Our Lady of the Angels was exclusively composed of black freedmen and slaves.57 Their members met periodically to organize and control their finances and their membership, and they were chosen annually by general election: a supervisor to collect money from their members; a secretary to keep the books; a treasurer; a caretaker of the chapel, images and altars; four deputies; various magistrates; and the collector of alms from the public. Their members considered their confraternities as symbolic of their ‘black nation’. This civil ‘autonomy’ exercised by freedmen and slaves in their confraternities was at the root of the ambivalent reception of Africans in early modern Spain. Wealthier confraternities and the royal authorities exerted strong social pressures to dissolve the black confraternities by constantly accusing them of theft, alcoholism, riots, and murders.58 Black confraternities even asked for papal intervention to ensure their existence: when Our Lady of the Angels was suppressed in 1614, their members appealed to Pope Urban VIII and their confraternity was successfully reinstated in 1633.59 These congregations were, as Moreno rightly argues, the only formal place for the black community to assert its collective identity with dignity. In the Triana district of Seville, there was also another black confraternity and hospital founded in 1584, dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, a cult promoted by the Dominicans in 1571 after the Spanish victory of Lepanto over the Moors. There is documentary evidence however that from the middle of the seventeenth century their members were the poor of this district, who kept the images and advocations of the black confraternity.60 In the middle of the sixteenth century, mixed-race slaves and freedmen created their own confraternity of Our Lady of the Presentation, approved in 1572 by the Archbishop of Seville, Cristóbal Rojas y Sandoval (1546–1618). It was located inside the city walls, in the chapel of the hospital of Our Lady of Bethlehem, at the back of the Jesuit church of the Annunciation. A few years later the congregation moved to the parish of San Ildefonso, until its disappearance in the middle of the eighteenth century.61 Saint Ildefonso was the seventh-century archbishop of Toledo (657–667), whose writings to prove ‘the holy mother’s perpetual virginity against three infidels’ and about the biblical origins of baptism and Hispanic baptismal practices made him a key Tridentine patron saint of Spain and the Crown.62 The mixed-race confraternity had their own chapel and entrance through the back door in the ‘Street of Mulattoes’, which kept this name until the late twentieth century.63

The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain  125 The concept and infrastructure of Our Lady of the Angels was also adopted in other urban centres in the kingdom of Castile: in Cádiz, Jerez de la Frontera, Puerto de Santa María, Málaga, Almendral, and Granada.64 Most of these black Spanish confraternities—founded either with the advocation of black patron saints, such as Benedict of Palermo or St Iphigenia of Ethiopia—or mixed-race confraternities dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, generally for slaves and freedmen, disappeared after the eighteenth century when they opened their membership to whites. In the kingdom of Aragon, groups of black freedmen created in 1455 the confraternity of St James, patron saint of Spain, martyr and Moor-slayer, in Barcelona;65 the house of black Africans, dedicated to Our Lady of Grace, in Valencia was founded in 1472.66 The first black confraternity of Seville also became the prototype for the Native American and black confraternities in the New World from the second half of the sixteenth century.67

III  Slaves in Early Modern Spanish Visual Culture The development of black confraternities, like the display of Velázquez’s portrait of Pareja with which the essay started, indicates the deep belief in the universality of the Catholic Counter-Reformation Church and in its evangelical charitable mission, which made the Church in Rome ‘look positively on the presence of have-nots’.68 It does not come as a surprise that Velázquez’s portrait of his slave became a popular image; at least five very fine copies were made subsequently.69 Other examples from Velázquez’s oeuvre reflect further, broader religious ideas. In Seville, Velázquez painted the only seventeenth-century portrait of a female slave at her workplace, in his Kitchen with Supper at Emmaus of c. 1617–18.70

Figure 7.2 Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. Artist: Diego Velázquez. Spanish, 17th century, c.1617–1618 Oil on canvas. Unframed: 55 × 118 cm. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland.

126  Carmen Fracchia This painting probably belonged to the Archbishop Castro y Quiñones, who promoted the baptism of Africans in Seville.71 In the background of Velázquez’s canvas, at the top left, one can see two men at a table, which has been accepted as the conventional religious depiction of the Supper at Emmaus. The presence of this religious scene inside the painting led to the traditional interpretation of this work in the context of the salvation of the poor; thus the expression of the female slave sitting at the table is seen as the effect of an ‘inner experience’ of the miracle taking place in the dining room behind the kitchen. Velázquez is obviously aware of early modern notions of slaves and the significance of their conversion to Christianity and the belief that salvation could reach every single person ‘irrespective of their social status or ethnic origin’.72 Velázquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja was built from the availability of a black model (Pareja) and the visual template of the more realistic representation of black people produced in the Netherlands in the early decades of the seventeenth century, when the presence of African slaves from the Iberian Empire increased in their territories.73 The embedded notions of Africans and their place in early modern Spanish society are represented in visual and literary forms. The authors of the Golden Age paid some attention to black slaves only from the second half of the sixteenth century: Mateo Alemán, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes.74 The Spanish visual production that represents black slaves is rare compared to its European counterpart, especially if we consider that the African presence during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was higher in Iberia than in the rest of Western Europe. The disproportion between the high visibility of African slaves in urban centres and their low invisibility in the art produced in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon is a feature of ‘slave-owning societies’.75 The Spanish case is however more extreme. Anonymous Flemish artists from the northern European provinces of the Habsburg Empire executed few depictions of slaves in early modern Spanish urban views. Those that did, like the Flemish painter Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600) and the German goldsmith and sculptor Christoph Weiditz (c. 1500–1559), codified the iconography of chained Afro-Hispanic slaves.76 The latter made drawings of these subjects fulfilling their social functions, with his written comments. This work was put together in his costume-book in the 1520s and 1530s.77 In his sketch entitled ‘Ships taking in water in Barcelona’, the artist depicts black galley slaves, and adds the following comment: ‘In this manner they bring fresh water in Barcelona to the ships and galleys so that it may be done more rapidly when they provision the ships or otherwise need water’.78 In another drawing, Weiditz’s annotation reads: ‘Black slave with a wineskin in Castile: Thus the Moors who have been sold carry wine in goatskins in Castile; if they run away from their masters, they have to work thus and wear chains’.79 The artist’s visual recording is a valuable testimony to the lives of Africans in early modern Spain. The rare iconography of a chained slave, which clearly expresses the notion of slaves as commodities, had no resonance in

The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain  127 the art of Castile and Aragon. Weiditz’s sketches were, however, based on direct observation during his travels in these Spanish kingdoms. He joined the itinerant court of Charles V in Castile, either in Toledo or Valladolid, where he arrived by invitation of Joannes Dantiscus, the Polish ambassador to the emperor. Weiditz’s visual documentation shows the impact of the African presence in Spain when the number of slaves increased greatly between the reconquest of Granada in 1492 and the wars of Cardinal Cisneros and then Charles V in North Africa from 1505 to 1541.80 African slaves were not depicted in Spanish royal portraiture until the last years of the eighteenth century; therefore the portrait of Pareja is extraordinary. The Four studies of a young Moor’s head of c. 1613–15 by Peter Paul Rubens (1577– 1640), who was also a ‘diplomat, courtier, and, humanist’, proved most influential for Velázquez. Paintings and prints were made after this painting during the 1630s and 1640s.81 This is not surprising since as Ernst van den Boogaart pointed out that in ‘Rubens’s circle the revival of the ancient Ethiopian Black encouraged a break with ethnocentric ideas of physical beauty and the reinvention of black beauty in its own right’.82 Velázquez, who met the Flemish master at the Habsburg court in 1628, was certainly aware of these innovative studies. Contact with Rubens also had a decisive impact on Velázquez: his palette became less austere, the colouring richer and his technique freer. Rubens encouraged his younger friend to travel to Italy and he first went there in 1629 and again between 1649 and 1651.83 Velázquez legally granted freedom to Pareja in Rome, on 23 November 1650,84 probably because in the Italian states, where domestic slavery was ‘a common feature . . . since the fourteenth century’, manumission was more frequently granted than in Spain.85 Pareja worked at the Habsburg court where there were a high proportion of slaves and other marginal subjects, such as dwarfs, who were also subjects of Velázquez’s portraits for Philip IV. Dwarfs were indispensable royal servants at least from 1446, and they were mainly employed as royal attendants, entertainers, and companions.86 They were also exchanged as gifts, like many court slaves, but they were never bought in auctions. In addition, dwarfs were allowed to own African slaves and other servants.87 Dwarfs were also symbols of social prestige. The relationship between masters and slaves only occasionally and exceptionally transcended the hegemonic view of slaves, and consequently few individuals could escape some of the social constraints suffered by the enslaved population, such as Juan de Pareja and the sixteenth-century ‘prodigious blacks’ from Granada recorded by Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza in his Ecclesiastical History of Granada (1639). These included Juan Latino, the first known black humanist and professor of Latin at the cathedral of Granada;88 Cristóbal de Meneses, a Dominican preacher; the embroiderer Catalina de Soto, known as the ‘queen of black Africans’; and the mixedrace lawyer Licenciado Ortiz who worked at the royal court.89 The presence of these individuals at the court and centres of learning, however, did not reflect their acceptance in broader Spanish society.

128  Carmen Fracchia Pareja was a court slave when he became a painter, in the face of the claim that visual art could only be practiced by free men. His mechanical activities in the workshop, suited to a slave, are described by his earliest biographer Antonio Palomino in Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale (1724);90 he claims that Pareja’s artistic success was achieved despite ‘the disgrace of his nature’ and thanks to his own moral qualities that belonged to the soul.91 Palomino emphasizes that Pareja acquired a second nature by the process of Christianization, by his ‘honest thoughts’, by his bondage to his master Velázquez, and, by his artistic abilities. It is believed that Pareja made one of the five copies after Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja, now at The Hispanic Society of America in New York.92 This portrait by his master, made when Pareja was legally a slave, became a template for his self-portrait as a freedman, one year after Velázquez’s death. Pareja choose to represent himself in the religious composition of The Calling of St Matthew, which he signed in Latin ‘Jo. de Pareja F[ecit]’ and dated: ‘1661’.93 In this large canvas, Pareja depicted an episode related in the Gospel of Matthew (9:9): ‘Jesus saw a man called Matthew at his seat in the custom house, and said to him, “Follow me”, and Matthew rose and followed him’. Matthew was a Jewish tax collector before he converted to Christianity to become an apostle of Christ and one of the four evangelists.94 Pareja chooses to articulate his attachment to his Christian African past; therefore he establishes a direct relationship between Matthew and Moses by placing

Figure 7.3 Juan de Pareja, The Calling of St Matthew, 1661, © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain  129 the painting of Moses and the Serpent on the wall of the tax office behind Matthew.95 Moses is represented as the liberator of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, where Matthew also preached. The latter, who is positioned between Moses and Christ, is seen as the instrument of Christ’s liberation in Ethiopia, while Pareja inscribes himself opposite Christ and in this way refers to himself as a biblical Ethiopian and subsequently as a free man. In fact, Matthew was the apostle of Ethiopia and in early modern European society Ethiopia was associated with Christianity, since it was considered the first nation to provide ‘the promise of Christian universality’. Thus, Pareja makes it clear to his audience that he himself belongs to the first Christian nation, which became the first source for ‘old Christians’ before Spain.96 Pareja’s self-portrait defies the core of the imperial policy of purity of blood in early modern Spain that excluded ‘new Christians’, Jews, Muslims, and black people in terms of their lack of purity of faith and therefore from economic and political power. Thus, Pareja implies that biblical Ethiopians are older and purer than the orthodox Christians of Spain. In his depiction, Pareja took the decision to Europeanize his own features. I believe that this statement was the only clear way that Pareja found to convey his status as a man free from the stigma of slavery when the blackness of his skin would always have reminded his audiences of his enslavement and questioned the sincerity of his Christian faith. Pareja had to differentiate himself from Muslims and Jews who had converted to Christianity and whose religions were considered hostile to the Iberian Empire. He might have been aware of the whitening of an African man in the popular prints of the ‘Baptism of the Ethiopian by Saint Philip’, where the only clue to the ethnicity of the African neophyte, who was none other than the eunuch prime minister of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, was to be found in the written inscription below the images, as in the engraving of the same subject by Michel Lasne: ‘You are not washing the Ethiopian in vain. Do not stop. The water poured by the priest can illuminate the black night’.97 This image encapsulates not only the justification of slavery but also the deep Tridentine belief in the power of baptism. The artist was aware that only this sacrament and the subsequent whitening of his self could transcend the powerful and older associations of blackness with sin and darkness and whiteness with purity and light.98 Therefore Pareja decided to become Candace’s minister by showing the whitening of his soul and physical appearance in his ambitious composition. The visual and symbolic process of self-Europeanization cleansed the stigma of manumission to reclaim Pareja’s social status as a free man at the Habsburg court in Madrid. His case was exceptional because he was close to the centre of the most powerful empire in early modern Europe. Instead, most slaves and ex-slaves were kept separated institutionally and spatially in urban centres, even if they were vital in economic and social terms. The established association that existed between the early modern social condition of chattel slavery, the identity of ‘new Christians’, and the non-white

130  Carmen Fracchia colour of the skin of enslaved Africans made sure that the latter group, even after their emancipation, could never escape their marginal position in imperial Spain. I also believe that the anxiety produced by these associations and the memory and fear of the Moors’ colonization of the Spanish kingdoms were the undercurrents that excluded African slaves and ex-slaves as subjects of visual representation. It probably explains why most depictions of black people who were perceived as slaves in early modern Spain are to be found in religious compositions, like the Adoration of the Magi, the Miracle of the Black Leg, the Immaculate Conception or depictions of black saints.99 Christianization was a powerful tool of inclusion (and domination) of slaves into Spanish society, although baptism did not remove the stigma of slavery and did not improve the social condition of Afro-Hispanic slaves and freedmen and women. Spain was not to abolish all slavery in the colonies until 1886, while it never formally did so in the Spanish peninsula.100

Notes 1 Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See Carmen Fracchia, ‘Metamorphosis of the Self in Early Modern Spain: Slave Portraiture and the Case of Juan de Pareja’ in Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (eds), Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 146–69. 2 See ‘Life of Velázquez’, translated from Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–24), 3 vols (Madrid, 1947), cited in Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez (Oxford, 1982), 3: pp. 209–10. 3 David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, 2006), p. 30. 4 Ibid., pp. 3, 30. For methods of punishment against slaves, see Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders. Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1972), pp. 180, 183; Alfonso Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media (Seville, 1979), pp. 209, 217–18. 5 José Andrés-Gallego and Jesús María García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros (Pamplona, 2002); Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, pp. 37–44; Carmen Fracchia, ‘Constructing the Black Slave in Spanish Golden Age Painting’ in Tom Nichols (ed.), Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe: Picturing the Social Margins (Aldershot, 2007), p. 191. 6 Aurelia Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI: género, raza y religión (Granada, 2000), pp. 65–89. 7 Andrés-Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros, pp. 28–53; Davis, Inhuman Bondage, p. 96. 8 This quotation is cited in English in Tanya J. Tiffany, ‘Light, Darkness, and African Salvation: Velázquez’s Supper at Emmaus’, Art History 31 (February 2008), 44. See also Ibid., 41–6. 9 Jeanette Favrot Peterson, ‘Perceiving Blackness, Envisioning Power: Chalma and Black Christs in Colonial Mexico’ in Dana Leibsohn and Jeanette Favrot Peterson (eds), Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World (Farnham, 2012), p. 50. I would like to thank Jane Stevens Crawshaw for this useful reference. 10 John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716 (London, 2002), pp. 107, 221; Susan Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain: Sevillian Confraternities and the Processional Sculpture of Holy Week (Princeton NJ, 1998), pp. 31–2.

The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain  131 11 Carmen Fracchia, ‘The Urban Slave in Spain and New Spain’ in Elizabeth McGrath and Jean Michel Massing (eds), The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem (London and Turin, 2012), p. 204. 12 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 176–7. 13 Aurelia Martín Casares, ‘Free and Freed Black Africans in Granada in the Time of the Spanish Renaissance’ in Thomas F. Earle and Kate J.P. Lowe (eds), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 2005), p. 252. 14 This quotation is cited in Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 170. See Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, ‘Sevilla en la época de Velázquez’ in Alfredo J. Morales et al (eds), Velázquez y Sevilla: Estudios (Seville, 1999), II, pp. 20–1; Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain: 1516–1619 (London, 1971), pp. 162–72. 15 José Luis Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España (Madrid, 1986), p. 123; Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 176–77. 16 Enriqueta Vila Villar, Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos (Seville, 1977); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800 (London and New York, 1998), pp. 131–2, 135, 141–2. 17 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 171; Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España, p. 111. 18 Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España, pp. 64–75, Carmen Fracchia, ‘(Lack of) Visual Representation of Black Slaves in Spanish Golden Age Painting’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (Tesserae) 10 (2004), 28; Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 175, 179. 19 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 174; Fracchia, ‘(Lack of) Visual Representation of Black Slaves in Spanish Golden Age Painting’, 27. 20 Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, pp. 73–103, 193. 21 See Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton NJ, 1990), p. 15, Figure 2. 22 Alonso Morgado, History of Seville (1589), cited in Ruth Pike, Enterprise and Adventure: The Genoese in Seville and the Opening of the New World (London, 1966), p. 29. 23 Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain, p. 163; Fracchia, ‘The Urban Slave in Spain and New Spain’, pp. 195–216; Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 177–8, 180. 24 Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI, Chapter 1; Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, p. 215. 25 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 177, 178; Martín Casares, ‘Free and Freed Black Africans in Granada in the Time of the Spanish Renaissance’ in Earle and Lowe (eds), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, pp. 255–56; Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, p. 193. 26 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 185–6. 27 Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville, p. 20; John Edwards, Inquisition (Stroud, 2003), p. 153; Isidoro Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas. Estructura, Simbolismo e Identidad (Seville, 1985), p. 47. 28 Antonio Collantes de Terán Sánchez, Sevilla en la Baja Edad Media: La ciudad y sus hombres (Seville, 1984), p. 261. 29 Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 96, 117. 30 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 184; Collantes de Terán Sánchez, Sevilla en la Baja Edad Media, p. 96; Martín Casares, ‘Free and Freed Black Africans in Granada’, p. 256; Luis Méndez Rodríguez, Esclavos en la pintura sevillana de los Siglos de Oro (Seville, 2011), p. 83. 31 Martín Casares, ‘Free and Freed Black Africans in Granada’, p. 256. 32 Ibid., p. 257. 33 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 181.

132  Carmen Fracchia 34 Ibid., p. 184; Martín Casares, ‘Free and Freed Black Africans in Granada’, p. 256. 35 Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, p. 53; Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville, p. 24. See also Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, p. 16. 36 Isidoro Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla: Etnicidad, poder y sociedad en 600 años de Historia (Seville, 1997); Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca NY, 1989); Debra Blumenthal, ‘ “La Casa dels Negres”: Black African Solidarity in Late Medieval Valencia’ in Earle and Lowe (eds), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, pp. 225–46. 37 Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, pp. 46–51, 53, 55, 194–7. 38 This confraternity was founded ‘before 1400’: Diego Ortíz de Zúñiga, Anales eclesiásticos y seculares de la muy noble ciudad de Sevilla, metrópolis de la Andalucía, que contienen sus más principales memorias desde el año de 1246, en que emprendió conquistiarla del poder de los Moros el gloriosísimo Rey S. Fernando III de Castilla y León, hasta el 1671en que la Católica Iglesia le concedió el culto y título de Bienaventurado (Madrid, 1677), pp. 77–8. See also Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 27, 49–56. 39 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 25, 35, 47. 40 Ortiz de Zúñiga, Anales eclesiálsticos y seculares de la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla, p. 78. 41 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 174; Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 43, 53. 42 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 178–9. See also Méndez Rodríguez, Esclavos en la pintura sevillana de los Siglos de Oro, pp. 44–62. 43 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 44. 44 Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, p. 55; Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 173–4. 45 Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, pp. 36–7; Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 59–67. 46 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 45–6. 47 Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, p. 55. 48 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, pp. 71–2. 49 Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, pp. 33, 34, 35, 38. See also Franco Silva, La esclavitud en Sevilla y su tierra a fines de la Edad Media, p. 223; Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, p. 195; Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI, p. 423. 50 Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, p. 34. 51 Ibid., pp. 23–4, 48. See Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, translated by H.J. Schroeder (St. Louis, 1950), Session 22, p. 157; Flynn, Sacred Charity, pp. 116–19. 52 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 120. 53 Nelson H. Minnich, ‘The Catholic Church and the Pastoral Care of Black Africans in Renaissance Italy’ in Earle and Lowe (eds), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, p. 299; Joaneath Spicer, ‘Free Men and Women of African Ancestry in Renaissance Europe’ in Joaneath Spicer (ed.), Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Princeton NJ, 2013), p. 85. 54 Sara T. Nalle, ‘A Saint for all Seasons: The Cult of San Julián’ in Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (eds), Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain (Minneapolis MN, 1992), p. 25; Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven and London, 1994), pp. 57–8. 55 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 65.

The Place of African Slaves in Early Modern Spain  133 56 Spicer, ‘Free Men and Women of African Ancestry in Renaissance Europe’, pp. 85–6. 57 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, pp. 188–9; Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, pp. 140–41. 58 Verdi Webster, Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain, pp. 44–5; Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, pp. 46–51, 55,194–7. 59 Moreno, La antigua hermandad de los negros de Sevilla, p. 34. 60 Ibid., pp. 73–4, 76. 61 Ibid., p. 76. 62 Flynn, Sacred Charity, p. 30. 63 Pike, Aristocrats and Traders, p. 186. 64 Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, pp. 194–7; Joaquín Álvaro Rubio, La esclavitud en Barcarrota y Salvaleón en el período moderno (Siglos XVI–XVIII) (Badajoz, 2005), pp. 173–6. It is interesting that the two black confraternities in the city of Granada, St Benedict of Palermo and Our Lady of the Encarnación, were located in the Christian centre of the city: see Martín Casares, La esclavitud en la Granada del siglo XVI, pp. 422–3. 65 Cortés López, Los orígenes de la esclavitud negra en España, p. 175; William D. Philips, Jr., Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Seville (Philadelphia PA, 2014), p. 94. 66 Blumenthal, ‘ “La Casa dels Negres”: Black African Solidarity in Late Medieval Valencia’, pp. 225–46. 67 Moreno, Cofradías y Hermandades Andaluzas, pp. 196–7. 68 Peter Higginson, ‘Poverty and Papal Piety in Rome c. 1600: Painting, Pastoralism and Spectacle’ in Nichols (ed.), Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe, p. 93; Livio Pestilli, ‘Blindness, Lameness and Mendicancy in Italy (from the 14th to the 18th Centuries)’ in Nichols (ed.), Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe, p. 115. See also Francisco de Borja Medina, ‘La experiencia sevillana de la Compañía de Jesús en la evangelización de los esclavos negros y su representación en América’ in Aurelia Martín Casares and Margarita García Barranco (eds), La esclavitud negroafricana en la Historia de España. Siglos XVI y XVII (Granada, 2010), pp. 75–94. 69 Everett Fahy, ‘Provenance’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 29 (1970/71), 475; Joseph Focarino (ed.), Velázquez in New York Museums (New York, 2000), pp. 14–18. 70 The painting is at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. David Davies and Enriqueta Harris (eds), Velázquez in Seville (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 128–9, 132– 9; Fracchia, ‘(Lack of) Visual Representation of Black Slaves in Spanish Golden Age Painting’, pp. 24–8. 71 Tiffany, ‘Light, Darkness, and African Salvation’, p. 42. 72 Davies and Harris (eds), Velázquez in Seville, p. 134; Tiffany, ‘Light, Darkness, and African Salvation’, pp. 33–56. 73 Black is Beautiful: Rubens to Dumas, edited by Elmer Kolfin and Esther Schreuder (Zwolle, 2008), pp. 75–85. 74 Baltasar Fra-Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1995). 75 Elizabeth McGrath, ‘Preface’ in McGrath and Massing (eds), The Slave in European Art, p. ix. 76 Fracchia, ‘The Urban Slave in Spain and New Spain’, pp. 197–200. 77 See Christoph Weiditz, Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance. All 154 Plates from the “Trachtenbuch” (New York, 1994). 78 Ibid., plates 63–4. See Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, http://com mons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Trachtenbuch_des_Christoph_Weiditz#/ media/File:Weiditz_Trachtenbuch_073–074.jpg

134  Carmen Fracchia 79 Ibid., plate 47, on the left of the image in Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Trachtenbuch_des_ Christoph_Weiditz#/media/File:Weiditz_Trachtenbuch_022–023.jpg 80 Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716, pp. 53–6. 81 For Rubens’s paintings Four heads (Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire de Belgique, Brussels) and A head, c. 1620 (The Hyde Collection Art Museum, Glens Arts, Brussels). See Black Is Beautiful: Rubens to Dumas, pp. 76–8. 82 Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘Black Slavery and the “Mulate Escape Hatch” in the Brazilian Ensembles of Frans Post and Albert Eckhout’ in McGrath and Massing (eds), The Slave in European Art, p. 234. 83 Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez (Oxford, 1982), pp. 15, 67; Sarah Schroth and Ronni Baer (eds), El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III (London, 2008), pp. 47, 92–5. 84 Fracchia, ‘Metamorphosis of the Self in Early Modern Spain’, pp. 148–9. 85 Rick Scorza, ‘Messina 1535 to Lepanto 1571. Vasari, Borghini and the Imagery of Moors, Barbarians and Turks’ in McGrath and Massing (eds), The Slave in European Art, p. 139. 86 Janet Ravenscroft, ‘Dwarfs—And a Loca—As Maids at the Spanish Habsburg Courts’ in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds), The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting Across Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013), p. 151; José Moreno Villa, Locos, enanos, negros y niños palaciegos. Siglos XVI y XVII: gente de placer que tuvieron los Austrias en la corte española desde 1563 a 1700 (Mexico City, 1939); Janet Ravenscroft, ‘Invisible Friends: Questioning the Representation of the Court Dwarf in Hapsburg Spain’ in Waltraud Ernst (ed.), Histories of the Normal and the Abnormal: Social and Cultural Histories of Norms and Normativity (Oxford, 2006), pp. 26–52. 87 Fernando Bouza, Cartas de Felipe II a sus hijas (Madrid, 1998), pp. 91, 99; Ravenscroft, ‘Dwarfs—And a Loca—As Maids at the Spanish Habsburg Courts’, p. 164. 88 Baltasar Fra-Molinero, ‘Juan Latino and His Racial Difference’ in Earle and Lowe (eds), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, p. 331. 89 Martín Casares, ‘Free and Freed Black Africans in Granada’, pp. 258–60. 90 Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El Museo Pictórico y Escala Óptica (1715–24) 3 vols (Madrid, 1947), III, pp. 960–61. 91 Fracchia, ‘Metamorphosis of the Self in Early Modern Spain’, p. 151. 92 See Elizabeth du Gué Trapier (ed.), Catalogue of Paintings (16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries) in the Collection of the Hispanic Society of America (New York, 1929), pp. 162–5. 93 Prado Museum, Madrid. 94 Fracchia, ‘Metamorphosis of the Self in Early Modern Spain’, pp. 151, 156–7. 95 Ibid., p. 159. 96 Ibid., p. 160. 97 Jean Michel Massing, ‘From Greek Proverb to Soap Advert: Washing the Ethiopian’, Journal of the Warburg and the Courtauld Institute 58 (1995), 188–91. 98 Favrot Peterson, ‘Perceiving Blackness, Envisioning Power’, p. 64. 99 Fracchia, ‘Constructing the Black Slave in Spanish Golden Age Painting’, pp. 180–4; Carmen Fracchia, ‘Spanish Depictions of the Miracle of the Black Leg’ in Kees W. Zimmermann (ed.), One Leg in the Grave Revisited: The Miracle of the Transplantation of the Black Leg by the Saints Cosmas and Damian (Groningen, 2013), pp. 79–91. 100 Fracchia, ‘The Urban Slave in Spain and New Spain’, p. 216.

8 The Margins in the Centre Working Around Rialto in Sixteenth-Century Venice* Rosa M. Salzberg

In a cheap printed pamphlet of the 1580s, the comic character Zan Padella, a country hick from Bergamo at the periphery of the Venetian State, described what he saw when he arrived in the booming metropolis of Venice. Disembarking at Rialto, Padella, who had been driven towards the city by his hunger and poverty, was rendered speechless by the abundance of food in the marketplace and the wealth on display at the banker’s tables around the square of San Giacomo. His wonder only increased as he proceeded towards Piazza San Marco, where there rose before him: . . . a bridge made all of wood . . . And when I saw it so burdened With people and shops and stalls I was struck dumb.1 Padella then echoed the cacophany of sellers of different goods audible around the bridge (‘Who wants some fine needles? / . . . Shirt laces, two for a marchetto!’), mingling with the plaints of beggars appealing to passersby for charity (‘Succour this wretched blind man / Deprived of the light of the world and barely alive!’).2 Comic and exaggerated though it was meant to be, this work gives us a rare sense of the visual and aural landscape of the centre of Venice, at the time one of the wealthiest, most populous, most cosmopolitan cities in Europe, and the capital of an empire that stretched from the eastern Mediterranean to the Alps. If Piazza San Marco was the civic and religious focal point of the city (with the seat of the doge and the major councils at the Palazzo Ducale, and the most important church in Venice, San Marco), Rialto was undoubtedly the commercial nexus, the locus of trade ranging from the most lucrative deals down to the smallest transactions.3 However, unlike the Piazza, which remains impressive and imposing today, the visitor to the Rialto area now, walking amidst the remaining tourist stalls and bars, has to employ more imagination to conjure up its past life. The buildings constructed here tended to be somewhat more utilitarian structures (arcades, shops, vaults) designed principally to facilitate all of the transient activity with which Rialto pulsed—the swift flow of people, goods, and money.

136  Rosa M. Salzberg Texts like Zan Padella’s help us to reanimate Rialto, and remind us that it was not just a place for government officials and patrician merchants; it thronged with many people we might typically consider to be ‘marginal’, from immigrants to poor beggars and itinerant pedlars. As well as making themselves audible and visible in this most central of urban spaces, many of these people, particularly pedlars, were essential to the economic functions of the area. And yet, in historical accounts, their voices are often silent and their presence relegated to a generic background, if not erased entirely.4 This article zooms in on Rialto in order to investigate the interplay of centrality and marginality, both spatial and social, in the early modern metropolis. It asks what it meant to inhabit this space, particularly to work or pass one’s days there, and how this important area was used and experienced by what Stephen Milner has called the ‘marginalized majority’.5 To do so, it examines a trial of the Venetian branch of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, an institution whose records possess great (and, to a degree, still largely untapped) potential to bring to light people and places notoriously difficult to access via other sources, such as mobile individuals who moved in and out of the city and the urban spaces (streets, taverns, lodging houses, workshops) where illicit ideas, words and texts circulated.6 Investigating the activities and beliefs of pedlars who worked in the Rialto area, this valuable source suggests the complex and shifting interactions between social and physical geography in Venice, and illustrates how factors such as poverty, mobility, foreignness, and even religious heterodoxy did not simply make a person marginal. Even those on the fringes of mainstream society forged ties with people around them and participated actively in city life. However, the case examined here also indicates how ordinary people were affected by greater efforts in the later sixteenth century to preserve order and orthodoxy in the city, as the Holy Office, supported by the Venetian government, sought to integrate those tempted by unorthodox religious beliefs and practices back into the Catholic community, and to exclude for good anyone who refused to abjure those beliefs. By considering this one particular trial, I want to show how placing the margins at the centre of scholarly attention reveals less familiar kinds of social networks, solidarities, and identities, as well as how they were faring at a time of upheaval and change.7

I  The Heart of the City Like many central spaces of early modern European cities, Rialto was defined by the mixture of people, by the multiplicity of functions enacted there, and by the flow of information and goods. Much of its importance was a function of its geographical centrality—at the heart of a city that was, for a few centuries, the most strategic crossing point for trade between Northern Europe, the Adriatic, and beyond that, the Mediterranean and the East. Passenger boats and merchandise from the Italian mainland disgorged their contents there, while cargoes from across the sea were unloaded at Rialto

The Margins in the Centre  137 after passing the international customs house at the mouth of the Grand Canal. Although few actually lived in the area, it attracted an unceasing stream of people everyday, rendering it an unparalleled hub of information and communication, commerce and leisure, interaction and negotiation.8 Within the city itself, Rialto was a crucial, unavoidable, space. The bridge was then the only way for a pedestrian to cross the Grand Canal that cut Venice in half, creating a bottleneck for foot traffic and an obvious place for selling and begging.9 In another popular poem from the late sixteenth century, the bridge was given a voice and it complained that: . . . nearly the whole world I have had on my back While they went on their way And more than ever I am trampled on, But I am groaning from every side.10 Old and run down, and having collapsed several times, the bridge was renovated between 1587–91, to replace the old wooden version with the more elegant stone construction that still stands. The bridge, however, remained a locus for retail trade spanning the top and bottom ends of the spectrum. It housed the shops of affluent mercers and other prominent retailers, but also was occupied daily by numerous pedlars, as we will see.11 By locating many of the magistracies associated with economic matters at Rialto, as well as one of the city’s prisons, the Venetian state declared its intention to supervise this crucial economic precinct, attempting to organize its chaotic activity by zoning, prohibiting, policing, punishing.12 In truth, though, it was impossible to control every transaction and force every commercial operator to stay in their place and obey the rules. At least from the thirteenth century there had been attempts to keep the area free of unlicensed pedlars as well as unsightly beggars; from the later fifteenth century, efforts increased to clean up Rialto and make it a more attractive and elegant environs appropriate for patricians and high-level trade.13 Events of the sixteenth century, when the population of Venice was swelled by the rapid immigration of people looking for work, for refuge from conflict on the Italian mainland and in the Mediterranean, and for food during recurrent and chronic grain shortages, would only make concerns about maintaining order and ensuring the provisioning of Rialto more acute.14 Nonetheless, it was almost impossible to prevent the co-optation of this central space for unauthorized, improvised activity; the margins continually occupied the centre.

II Pedlars Pedlars and street sellers in the early modern period often were marginal people in a traditional sense. Peddling was a common strategy of the poor,

138  Rosa M. Salzberg the physically disabled, of migrants, women, the young and the old and untrained or no longer able to work in other professions. Some pedlars were so poor as to be on the verge of begging, and the lines between these two activities often blurred. Furthermore, many belonged to the informal or ‘shadow economy’ outside of the guilds, or if they did belong to these organizations, they were usually the least vocal and prominent members.15 Although mobility was often essential to the livelihood of pedlars—some moved not only around cities but came and went to fairs and on selling trips—this could exacerbate their marginality in social terms, making it hard for them to retain networks of support and at times rendering them subject to the kind of suspicion aimed at other mobile groups such as Gypsies, vagabonds, or charlatans.16 Nonetheless, recent research has focused attention on pedlars and shown how a shift of perspective can reveal them as essential operators in early modern economic life.17 As well as carrying commodities ever further out into rural areas, street selling was ubiquitous in towns and cities. Shop-based commerce blurred into the street trade, and many pedlars interacted with shopkeepers and producers of goods, sometimes directly employed by them to take their wares out onto the streets. While guildsmen and more settled artisans and shopkeepers at times sought to distance themselves from pedlars and blame them for various kinds of fraud and illicit dealing, in truth these two types of commercial operators were often closely interlinked.18 Pedlars were a vital part of early modern urban life, essential cogs in the commercial system that delivered to consumers everything from everyday items of food to a proliferating array of small luxury goods. In another sense, too, pedlars were not marginal at all. They typically placed themselves in the most central spaces, ensuring that they gained the attention of customers with their physical presence, their voices, and the display of their wares, even if this also irritated urban authorities who saw them as a nuisance, cluttering up the streets and making noise. For all of these reasons, pedlars exemplify the fluid interaction of centres and margins in Venice and other early modern European cities.

III  ‘Quelli del Ponte’ In July 1572, during a period when they were beginning to crack down more severely on heresy in the city, the Venetian branch of the Holy Office received the denunciation of Prospero, a thirty-six-year-old hatter (capeller) from Bologna who peddled his goods on the Rialto. The denunciation, signed by a mercer with a shop on the bridge, asserted that, among other things, Prospero had been heard to speak ill of the pope, priests, and friars, and in support of the Huguenots and other Protestant forces currently doing battle across Europe.19 This immediately raises interesting questions about the kinds of social and religious networks into which a poor, uneducated pedlar was connected, how much he knew about contemporary European

The Margins in the Centre  139 events, and how he identified with other persecuted religious groups far away, to which I will return. When questioned, however, Prospero claimed to have picked up most of his problematic religious ideas closer to home, from another local pedlar: Battista Amai, also known as Battista dalle bambine because he made and sold small enamel figurines or dolls.20 Battista, like Prospero, was not native to Venice, although he had come there from Cremona in central-northern Italy some thirty years earlier. By the time the case unfolded, the two pedlars had known each other for several years, becoming close enough for Prospero to stand as godfather to one of Battista’s children. According to Prospero, Battista, who was about fifteen years older, had ‘intoxicated me with his words’.21 As the trial proceeded and the Holy Office sought to establish the character and beliefs of these two figures, they interviewed a host of other local sellers: friends, enemies, acquaintances, or business contacts who shared the same zone of work. Eight out of the ten witnesses questioned in this case worked in the Rialto area, and these witnesses and the defendants themselves in turn referred to numerous other artisans, shopkeepers, and pedlars, mostly operating around Rialto and sometimes also around San Marco.22 Although set within the world of the city’s artisans and retailers that becomes familiar from reading sixteenth-century Holy Office records, this case (of around fifty folio pages) is unusual in giving so much detail on pedlars in particular, figures who tend to turn up only in the margins of other kinds of archival records, for example guild records. Reading such a document gives a valuable sense of how seemingly marginal people conceived of their place in the social and urban fabric, and how this squared with the attempts of civic and ecclesiastical authorities to police social and religious borders in the later sixteenth century.23 The case also reveals, at least partially, a rarely glimpsed realm of lowlevel artisanal production and retail. As well as people, we catch sight of a range of more or less humble goods that formed part of the expanding material culture of early modern people, but of the kind that now rarely survive, from rosaries, items of haberdashery and drapery (laces, cords, needles, handkerchiefs, veils), to cutlery, fire-strikers (azzalini), and cheap printed pamphlets.24 As suggested above, the lines between shop and street-based retail were blurred.25 Some of those, like Prospero and Battista, who sold on the streets, also clearly made what they sold but did not have their own workshops (botteghe) with apprentices or workers whom they could send out to peddle in their stead. These kinds of operators tended to specialize in one or at most a couple of related goods, generally small, portable commodities that were relatively cheap and easy to produce, everyday items, and low-level luxuries. The activity of many of the pedlars mentioned in this case would technically have brought them under the jurisdiction of the powerful mercers’ guild, which struggled against uncontrolled street selling of goods belonging to the catch-all category of ‘mercery’, but it is likely that some of them operated outside of the corporation.26

140  Rosa M. Salzberg It is worth noting that female pedlars are conspicuously absent in this case, although there must have been many of them active, particularly as sellers of food, in the market area nearby. Their absence is difficult to explain, since scholars have demonstrated the frequent presence of working women in the central spaces of early modern Venice, as well as their participation in heterodox religious networks.27 Furthermore, the mercers’ guild did permit some women to peddle small amounts of goods. Many of these appear to have been wives, widows, or daughters of registered members, and indeed, the only woman mentioned as a seller in this case was the wife of a Paduan mercer ‘who sells mercery on San Pantalon square’.28 It seems likely that women pedlars were the most marginal of marginal workers, peripheral within the largely male social and professional networks that emerge in this particular trial at least, and it will require further archival work to reconstruct their presence in the urban environment.29 Certainly, women were unlikely to have had the same freedom of mobility—for example, to travel to fairs on the mainland—that we will see was common to male pedlars and which probably encouraged the formation of connections and solidarities between them. As for the men mentioned in this trial, even if they operated on the fringes of the guild community and did not have the stability and prominence symbolized by a permanent bottega, Rialto clearly constituted a kind of professional neighbourhood for them. Moreover, since the Holy Office chose to question local workers rather than the defendants’ residential neighbours, we might conclude that this professional neighbourhood was more important as a social space for them than the areas in which they lived.30 In other Holy Office cases, residential neighbours and parish priests were important witnesses for the activity of suspected heretics, but in this case only Battista’s local sacristan was interviewed, who attested to the enameller’s poverty but did not have much else to say.31 It is possible that poor, migrant workers such as these moved their lodgings more frequently than was the norm, and thus were less rooted in their residential communities than other Venetians who came before the Holy Office; hence the tribunal turned principally to their professional (rather than residential) neighbours for information.32 By focusing their attention on Rialto workers, the Holy Office, as well as illuminating the quotidian commercial environment of the city, permits us some appreciation of Rialto as a social and occupational space—and it appears to have been one that was particularly dynamic and fluid, while also distinct and enduring over time. This trial suggests that people whom we might expect to have been marginal and marginalized, on the fringes of the social and economic life of the city, were not entirely so. For example, most of the men mentioned were more or less recent migrants to the lagoon (coming predominantly from within or near to the Venetian territorial state); however, in a city with a very large number of foreign-born residents, this does not seem to have prevented them from forming bonds with those who worked with and near them. That is not to say that migrants from the

The Margins in the Centre  141 Italian mainland may not have found it easier to blend into the Venetian community than did those marked out more strongly by differences of language, religious rite, or appearance. These more ‘foreign’ foreigners likely did not fit in as easily and quickly and stuck closer to their compatriots. For example, when the Holy Office was seeking more information about a pedlar of acqua de vita (spirits) in another case of 1572, a local vendor suggested that they speak to ‘those from his country [the Grisons region, now in Switzerland], who live with him’.33 In contrast, most of the sellers habitually operating in this area recognized one another and interacted, sometimes over a period of years. The mercer Bernardino from Padua, who made the original denunciation, attested that he had known Battista for five or six years ‘because he sells on the Rialto Bridge, as do I’.34 A belt-maker called Andrea affirmed that he knew Prospero for the same reason.35 Some of the pedlars clearly formed lasting bonds between themselves, despite the tenuous and unpredictable nature of their careers. Giacomo Angelo degli Urani, a pedlar of handkerchiefs, knives and printed stories, who had had his own troubles with the Holy Office in the mid 1560s, attested that he had known Battista for about seven years; Giacomo Angelo’s friend, Zuane spagnoletto (‘the little spaniard’) who sold rosaries, had known him for seventeen.36 Selling nearby, and sometimes even side by side, these men, to whom one seller referred collectively as quelli del Ponte (‘those of the Bridge’), discussed their opinions and ideas with each other, or overheard each others’ conversations. ‘Another time, during the Sensa [a large commercial fair held in Venice each May] I was selling my stuff next to [Battista] on the waterfront next to the Paglia Bridge . . .’, began the story of one seller; ‘many times while selling on the Rialto Bridge we have conversed together’, admitted another.37 Working in proximity also led to enmities, however. For example, Prospero claimed to have been denounced by other local vendors who disliked him because he would not sell his hats to them cheaply enough, while Battista, in contrast, believed other sellers despised him because he undercut their prices.38 After Prospero was imprisoned by the Holy Office, Battista soon heard the news and came to see him with three cronies (‘Zuane spagnoletto who sells rosaries around the piazza and on the Rialto Bridge and near the Paglia Bridge . . . Franco who sells shirt-laces in the same places, and . . . Bezzeto who makes forks and sells in the same places’) to find out why he was there and perhaps intimidate him into keeping quiet.39 Prospero lied to Battista, saying he was in prison for debt, but Battista soon discovered the truth from the other Rialto sellers.

IV  Friendship and Fama As in a residential neighbourhood, where people developed a reputation or fama in the eyes of their neighbours, the workers around Rialto observed each others’ actions and listened to each others’ words, forming (sometimes

142  Rosa M. Salzberg negative) impressions of each other. Bernardino the mercer, for instance, asserted that ‘from one end of Rialto to the other [Battista] is believed to be a heretic’.40 Similarly, when asked about Prospero’s reputation on the bridge, another Rialto mercer responded: ‘he is considered a Lutheran’, a tag also attached to Battista by the young boys who sold in the area who shouted it after the pedlar as he passed by.41 A vendor of haberdashery and fruit noted that he had heard rumours about Battista ‘ever since I have worked on the Rialto Bridge, which [means it] is eight years that I have heard that this Battista . . . was a Huguenot, and the same was said of Prospero because he associated with this Battista ever since he, Prospero, came to sell on the Bridge maybe three or four years ago’.42 The language with which these people labelled each other is worth remarking on. Although Martin identified three principal strains of heterodox thought in Renaissance Venice (evangelism, Anabaptism, and millenarianism), tags such as lutherano or ugonotto seem to have been thrown quite loosely at anyone considered to hold unorthodox beliefs, suggesting a desire to mark out and marginalize such people, if not a precise understanding of their religious inclinations.43 Memorable incidents that took place in the neighbourhood also were recounted to illustrate the characters of the suspected men. A draper with a shop under the arcade of the Drapparia at the foot of the Bridge, for instance, recalled an episode when Battista laughed at a blind man whose sight supposedly had been restored by a local miracle-working image of the Madonna, but who tripped when he tried to walk alone in front of the draper’s shop. ‘The Madonna cures little by little’, Battista allegedly scoffed, mocking the very idea of miracles, and adding: ‘lead him to her another time, then he will be able to see better’.44 Battista may have gained a reputation for his irreverent outbursts, but he was not completely marginalized in the Rialto community. A flexible kind of solidarity persisted between these sellers, despite their occasional differences; when Prospero was imprisoned by the Holy Office, word went around Rialto sellers about what had befallen him, and Battista was warned by them to flee the city before he himself was caught.45

V Mobility Strikingly, too, this professional neighbourhood retained a certain coherence even as its members frequently came and went, both from the area and from the city itself. Regular mobility, especially to and from the Italian mainland, was not at all unusual in Venice.46 Several sellers referred to travelling repeatedly, and sometimes together, to the mainland to attend fairs. Domenego, who sold fire-strikers and matches on the Rialto, reported that he had been away at a fair with Prospero and Battista when they refused to go to mass, going instead to eat at a tavern.47 The same two suspected men travelled to a fair in Treviso together before deciding to continue on to

The Margins in the Centre  143 Geneva to meet others who shared their beliefs. Although they turned back at Bergamo, about 230 kilometres from Venice, because of heavy snow, these trips suggest the easy and frequent mobility of these men in search of economic opportunities, spiritual sustenance, or simply adventure and novelty.48 But travels to the mainland, and further over the Alps to places such as Geneva and the southern German cities, also put ordinary Italians such as these pedlars in contact with foreign Protestant communities and other mobile people on the road, and meant that they could act as transmitters of ideas and opinions.49 In this regard, it is also interesting to note the sense of identification some of these pedlars had with other persecuted Protestant communities across Europe, and the facility with which they seem to have had access to information about their travails. In July 1572, as the Protestant forces were resurgent in the ongoing Dutch Revolt and the French Huguenots were about to head into the bloody massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, Prospero was reported to have rejoiced in the setbacks of King Phillip of Spain against the Dutch Protestants and exalted the chances of the Huguenots. As Rialto was one of Venice’s principal ‘information centres’, it is perhaps not surprising that these pedlars picked up updates from abroad quickly; it was not only high-level merchants or members of Venice’s political caste who were interested in, and privy to, international news.50

VI  ‘As Poor as Job’ Despite their international connections, the case emphasizes how many of those working around Rialto were united by enduring precarious and vulnerable lives on the economic (if not the physical) fringes of the city. This would have been immediately evident by their appearances; the notary described Prospero and Battista as wearing old, torn clothes, while Zuane spagnoletto dressed in the ‘cloak of a poor man’.51 Prospero begged the Inquisitors for mercy on account of his three small children and mogier meschina (‘wretched wife’) who had nothing to eat, while Battista insisted that he had ‘seven children to support and I am as poor as Job’.52 The sacristan of San Zulian confirmed that Battista and his family had been receiving support from the parish funds for the last two years, describing the pedlar as ‘encumbered and encircled by many miseries’, while Battista’s wife Franceschina, claiming she had no way to support her husband and children, also appealed to the Holy Office to release her husband from prison ‘so we do not die of hunger’.53 Despite his frequent trips to commercial fairs, when asked by the Holy Office if he had sought to entice others to go with him to Geneva for religious reasons, Battista insisted bitterly that he did not even have adequate funds to reach Mestre, just across the lagoon from Venice.54 Pedlars appear frequently to have been men who had failed to find a secure footing in artisanal or retailing trades. For example, Battista testified that he had worked for six years selling goods for a local mercer, but his

144  Rosa M. Salzberg fortunes had plunged when the mercer died and left his shop to someone else. The pedlar then lost all of his wares after he came under suspicion of carrying plague and eventually returned to Venice and began selling small items of mercery and enamel figurines on his own account, around the city and at fairs on the mainland.55 In taking up peddling and street selling, men such as Battista displayed the professional flexibility increasingly seen as characteristic of many people, but particularly of the poor, in early modern Europe, improvising economic opportunities as they arose.56 However, even if they could carve out a living as pedlars and a space for themselves at the heart of the city, their activity left them vulnerable to suspicion and occasionally exclusion, as carriers of disease, or of illicit goods or ideas. The struggles of these men to survive may also in part explain their attraction to reformist religious ideas. Strains of Protestant thought, which questioned the hierarchical status quo and entrenched economic inequality, plainly appealed to people like Battista and Prospero particularly because of their precarious positions. In conversation with Andrea the belt-maker, Battista, for example, was said to have railed against wealthy cardinals lavishing money on courtesans, comparing them unfavourably to the Lutherans whom he believed ‘are better, and more charitable than us, because they love each other, and give charity and hold all things in common’.57 These kinds of protests were in the air, according to another witness who claimed to have heard Battista and others in the streets grumbling that ‘lords [signori] are tyrannical dogs, who kill the people [populi] and the poor’.58 These were recurrent complaints, given a new tenor by the religious divisions of the age. Evidently, reformist religious ideas gave people like Battista a vocabulary to question and criticize the existing order of society and imagine other possibilities. At the same time, the sharing of heterodox opinions opened up new avenues of social solidarity and support, even as it also, and increasingly, presented dangers. As well as receiving charity from the local parish, Battista was reported to have accepted financial support from a foreign heretic who met him on the Bridge, as was the pedlar Giacomo Angelo.59 Although increasingly driven underground, strains of Protestantism drew together disparate groups and networks of people through shared conversations, ideas, and practices.

VII  Heterodox Spaces Despite the tenuous economic position of many of these pedlars, it should be evident that they were not entirely excluded from the social and cultural life of the city. Their limited means and education, for example, did not prohibit them from taking an interest in religious discussions and texts, and the sermons of controversial preachers. Battista, who claimed to be illiterate, had gone with an acquaintance, a Milanese rosary pedlar, to listen to a reformist preacher at the Church of San Mattio di Rialto in the 1540s.60

The Margins in the Centre  145 Prospero, at least according to the testimony of his erstwhile friend Battista, came into contact with heterodox ideas by renting out rooms to foreigners from Protestant lands, and indeed the city’s inns and lodging houses were frequently points of suspicion for the authorities investigating heresy because of the promiscuous mixing of people that took place in them.61 The broad diffusion of different religious ideas in the sixteenth century evidently opened up new, socially heterogeneous spaces for discussion and interaction that further complicated the intricate social geography of Venice. An interest in heterodox ideas did not automatically marginalize people; indeed, it brought them into contact with others of different walks of life. In the 1560s, the pedlar Giacomo Angelo, for instance, regularly discussed religious matters with an engineer who worked for the Agriculture Board in the engineer’s house as well as on the Rialto Bridge where the two men also engaged in economic transactions. The engineer, Massimo de’ Massimi, whose common-law wife also rented rooms to foreigners in their house in San Salvador just east of Rialto, in turn admitted to having conversed on the same topics with others including a painter and a couple of street singers.62 The appearance of a blind beggar called Piero as another defendant in the trial of Prospero and Battista further underlines the rather inclusive nature of this social cosmos. Piero habitually begged in the mornings in front of the Church of San Salvador and in the evenings on the Bridge itself, and he turned out to share some of the same heterodox opinions as the two pedlars. Piero was a familiar presence in this area, discussing his ideas over the years with other local pedlars and artisans. Begging at San Salvador and around Rialto, he participated in local life, listening and interacting. Like Battista, he claimed that he had been led astray in part by the sermons of reformist preachers heard in years past when the Venetian government had been more tolerant of their presence in the city. However, when questioned, Piero insisted that his false opinions had been gradually corrected because he had spent twelve years begging by the door of San Salvador, where he had heard ‘many good holy fathers preach who proved by the scriptures the authority of the pope and purgatory’ and other aspects of Catholic doctrine.63 Piero knew when it was prudent to return to his designated place in Venetian society, claiming to the Holy Office that he was no longer actively involved in debating religious ideas or proselytizing but now content to passively listen and absorb the orthodoxy preached from Venetian pulpits. So too, Prospero and Battista were eventually worn down by imprisonment and by the interrogations of the Inquisition over the space of a year to the point of confessing and abjuring their erroneous opinions. In October 1573, the two Rialto sellers were sentenced to be conducted to the door of the central church of San Marco where they were made to stand on a platform wearing a yellow penitential habit and with a lit candle in hand for two hours, as a warning and example to the community.64 Piero the blind beggar abjured and was given the same sentence a month later. It is not surprising that all three eventually stepped into line. Others who shared their

146  Rosa M. Salzberg beliefs had already left the city by the early 1570s, or were keeping their views closer to their chests. When eventually compelled to name those who shared the same religious convictions, Battista mentioned several who had departed from Venice, including one shoemaker who had been condemned to death in Mantua for heresy and another mercer who had gone to Lyons.65 Likewise, the downturn in fortunes of their co-religionists abroad, particularly in France, who were by now largely forced to convert or go into exile, may have discouraged these men further. Despite Venice’s reputation for openness to foreign people and free discussion, and the hopes and fears of many that the city would be the ‘gateway’ for Protestantism into Italy, from this time those who were seen to pose a threat to Venetian society and orthodoxy with their dangerous words and difficult-to-pin-down opinions were increasingly marginalized. They were labelled heretics and punished or forced to flee, or encouraged to abjure their beliefs and accepted back into the Catholic community on condition that they did not stray further.66 Trials like that of Prospero, Battista, and Piero offer a rare opportunity to glimpse Rialto and the wider urban landscape of Venice from the perspective of lowly workers and the poor who occupied the city streets every day. Although many of the figures who worked in the area might appear from one perspective to have been socially and economically marginal, they experienced and articulated a complex social cosmos, one riven by subtle divisions and hierarchies, religious differences, commercial conflicts, and varying customs and backgrounds.67 From the trial, delicate filaments of connection catch the light, woven from friendship or economic cooperation, from intellectual curiosity or charity, shared provenance or common rituals, tying together otherwise disparate people. They suggest that poverty and mobility did not simply or automatically make someone marginal. A professional neighbourhood like Rialto may not fit our traditional conception of ‘belonging’ in early modern society (one would tend to think rather of units such as the parish, guild, or confraternity), but it clearly constituted an important social space for the people who worked there. Frequenters of this space might find some kind of solidarity and mutual support within the networks that loosely (and sometimes more tightly) linked those occupying the area—networks both fragile and shifting but also, to some extent, resistant over time, and which must have been important for people with few other forms of support to call upon. At the same time, it is important to reiterate that the absence of women pedlars from this trial suggests their more peripheral position in these social and economic systems, and more research is needed to understand how they experienced and occupied the heart of the city. This case reminds us that the social geography of the early modern city was much more complex than any simple division of centre and margins. Moreover, across the sixteenth century, these centres and margins, in Venice at least, continued to be redefined. At certain times, the mobility, illiteracy,

The Margins in the Centre  147 poverty or nonconformity of men like the Rialto pedlars prompted their more settled and secure neighbours to mark out and exclude them. While philo-Protestant circles in the city largely had been broken up or stamped out by the 1580s, factors such as the devastating plague of the mid 1570s and worsening economic conditions meant that the final decades of the century encouraged the Venetian community to shore up its porous borders and seek to stem the fluid mobility so characteristic of the city, for example with tighter rules regulating the comings and goings of foreigners and the expulsion of mobile groups such as vagabonds.68 And yet, a closer look at an area like Rialto reveals the carefully articulated (and constantly shifting) degrees of belonging and exclusion that shaded this society. Even those on the social and economic margins created their own centres, continually occupying the heart of the city and forging their own, admittedly fragile, connections.

Notes * All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. I would like to thank Claire Judde de Larivière, Massimo Rospocher, Penny Roberts, and the editors of this volume for their comments. 1 ‘Un pont che tug de legn . . . / E quand ol vid si carch / De zent e de boteghi, e de banchet / E reste un turluru senza intelet . . .’. Viaggio de Zan Padella, cosa ridiculosa e bela, dond es descrif tug le cose ches vende sul punt de Rialt in Venesia (Modena, [ca. 1580]), cc. Aiir. This was probably the work of a street performer associated with the nascent commedia dell’arte, and it employs the mock-Bergamask dialect common to this performative tradition. 2 ‘Chi vol di aghi fini / . . . Cordoni da camisa do al marchetto’ (a marchetto was a coin equal to one soldo); ‘Soccorer sto meschin orbo che privo / De la luse del mondo a pena vivo’. Ibid, c. Aiir–iiir. The voices of Rialto pedlars, selling everything from cheap prints, to dogs, jewels, handkerchiefs, swords, bread, and needles, are also echoed in another late sixteenth-century poem. See Maffio Venier, Canzoni e sonetti (Venice, 1993), pp. 177–8. 3 By the ‘Rialto’, I refer to the area including the bridge, the market, and its immediate surroundings, more or less contiguent with the parishes of San Giovanni di Rialto, San Matteo di Rialto and San Silvestro, which form an island bordered by the Grand Canal and two smaller canals. This area was seen as a ‘quite separate district’ within the city with its own jurisdiction; Joseph Wheeler, ‘Neighbourhoods and Local Loyalties in Renaissance Venice’ in Alexander Cowan (ed.), Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400–1700 (Exeter, 2000), p. 33. See also Roberto Cessi and Annibale Alberti, Rialto. L’isola—il ponte—il mercato (Bologna, 1934); Donatella Calabi and Paolo Morachiello, Rialto: le fabbriche e il Ponte (1514–1591) (Turin, 1987). 4 See the careful archival work of Kate Lowe, which has shown how seemingly marginal and ‘invisible’ figures (in documentary terms) like Sub-Saharan Africans actually featured prominently in a trade as central in Renaissance Venice as that of the gondalier. See her ‘Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly 66 (2013), 412–52. 5 Stephen Milner, ‘Identity and the Margins of Italian Renaissance Culture’ in S. Milner (ed.), At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (Minneapolis MN, 2005), p. 14, drawing on the ideas of Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everday Life, translated by Stephen Rendall (Berkeley CA, 1984), pp. xvi–xvii.

148  Rosa M. Salzberg 6 See John Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (Baltimore MA, 2004), p. x. 7 The need to ‘centre the margins’ in order to re-energize Italian Renaissance studies also was emphasized by Milner, ‘Identity and the Margins’. 8 On the low number of residents in the area, see Calabi and Morachiello, Rialto, p. 17. On the circulation of information and print at Rialto, see Filippo De Vivo, Information and Communication: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007), pp. 89–94; Rosa Salzberg, ‘ “Selling stories and many other things in and through the city”: Peddling Print in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Venice’, Sixteenth Century Journal 42 (2011), 737–59. 9 Calabi and Morachiello, Rialto, p. 176. There were also, however, numerous ferry stations (traghetti) along the Grand Canal. 10 ‘Quasi tutto il mondo/Ho sostentato in sul mio dorso/Mentre han fatto il loro corso/Et più che mai son calpestrato,/Però crido in ogni lato’. Il gran lamento del Ponte de Rialto, qvalfa per esser posto sopra le dve galere, et le lavde della sva renovatione con vna laude della inclita Città di Venetia (Venice, 1588), c. Aiv. 11 On renovation of the bridge, see Calabi and Morachiello, Rialto. For the high rent of shops on the bridge, see Marin Sanudo, ‘Praise of Venice’ in David Chambers and Brian Pullan (eds), Venice: A Documentary History: 1450–1630 (Oxford, 1992), p. 12. 12 See James E. Shaw, The Justice of Venice. Authorities and Liberties in the Urban Economy, 1550–1700 (Oxford, 2006); Alessandra Princivalli and Gherardo Ortalli (eds), Il Capitolare degli Ufficiali sopra Rialto. Nei luoghi al centro del sistema economico veneziano (secoli XIII–XIV) (Milan, 1993), which includes an excellent map and description of where particular artisans and traders were meant to work (Lidia Fersuoch, ‘I luoghi del Capitolare degli Ufficiali sopra Rialto’, pp. LXXII–LXXVII). On the prison near the base of the bridge, which housed thieves, see Calabi and Morachiello, Rialto, p. 27. 13 Calabi and Morachiello, Rialto, pp. 25n, 32–5, 176; Cessi and Alberti, Rialto, pp. 66–72, 118–21. 14 Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1971); Andrea Zannini, Venezia città aperta. Gli stranieri e la Serenissima XIV–XVIII sec. (Venice, 2009). 15 Shaw, Justice of Venice, pp. 1–2. 16 Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Renaissance Italy 1400–1600 (New Haven and London, 2005), pp. 34–60. 17 Fernand Braudel recognized and explored the importance of peddling in his Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries, vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce, translated by Siân Reynolds (London, 1985), pp. 70–81. This was followed up by Laurence Fontaine’s important History of Pedlars in Europe, translated by Vicki Whittaker (Cambridge, 1996), although she surveyed the period up to 1700 only briefly. For an excellent overview of research, see Danielle Van den Heuvel, ‘Selling in the Shadows: Peddlers and Hawkers in Early Modern Europe’ in Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (eds), Working on Labour: Essays in Honour of Jan Lucassen (Leiden and Boston, 2012), pp. 125–51. 18 Salzberg, ‘Selling Stories’; Dean T. Ferguson, ‘The Body, the Corporate Idiom, and the Police of the Unincorporated Worker in Early Modern Lyons’, French Historical Studies 23 (2000), 545–75. 19 Archivio di Stato, Venice (henceforth ASV), Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, c. 1r. Denunciation dated 11 July 1572. This case is mentioned briefly by Martin in Venice’s Hidden Enemies, pp. 158–9, 210–11, and discussed more extensively by Jane K. Wickersham, Rituals of Prosecution: The Roman Inquisition and the Prosecution of Philo-Protestants in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Toronto, 2012), pp. 180–91, however their interests lie,

The Margins in the Centre  149 respectively, in exploring the circulation of heterodox ideas in the city and the interrogation methods of the Inquisition. On the Holy Office’s crackdown from the mid 1560s, after a relatively slow start following its reconstitution in the 1540s, see Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, Chapter 7. 20 On the popularity of secular and sacred child dolls (bambini/e) in Renaissance Italy, see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento’ in her Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago IL, 1987), pp. 310–29. 21 ‘Mi imbriagava con le sue parole’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, c. 7r. 22 The other two witnesses were the sacristan of San Zulian (where Battista lived) and the priest of San Giacomo dell’Orio, brother-in-law of another defendant, Piero, discussed below. 23 For useful reflections on the nature of trials as sources for non-elite social life and the careful ways in which they need to be read, see Thomas V. Cohen and Elizabeth S. Cohen, Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome: Trials Before the Papal Magistrates (Toronto, 1993), pp. 3–33. 24 All of the pedlars mentioned sold non-perishable goods, except for one mercer who also sold fruit. A similar, though smaller, range of pedlars appears in another trial of 1572. See ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 32, fasc. ‘Bortholamio Grison’. 25 This is indicated by the language used to describe the activities of different individuals. Shop-based sellers tended to be referred to by a professional moniker (such as marzer, or mercer) and often the location and/or sign of their shop. However, there appears to have been no distinct word for ‘pedlar’ in Venice in this period, and those who sold on the streets were more often indicated by their activity and the spaces they occupied, e.g., ‘vende per piazza’, ‘va vendando per la terra’. On the naming of pedlars, see also Salzberg, ‘Selling Stories’, 744. 26 Richard Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders. The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c.1250–c.1650 (London and Sydney, 1987), pp. 90–7; Shaw, Justice of Venice, pp. 94–8. Some records of membership of the guild from the 1580s and 90s are preserved in ASV, Arti, b. 397, and they include numerous sellers around Rialto, some of whom are clearly street sellers (some designated as poveri, poor) but I have not been able to certainly identify the pedlars from this case. 27 Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore MD and London, 2001); Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, pp. 67, 101, 140–41. 28 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, c. 8v. For guild regulation, see ASV, Arti, b. 312, c. 71. A register of female members of the guild from the 1580s (Arti, b. 397, libretto n. 21) includes some who seem to have sold in the streets. 29 See Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance, pp. 34–7; Van den Heuvel, ‘Selling in the Shadows’, p. 135. 30 Prospero lived at the eastern edge of Venice at San Domenego in Castello (also the location of the Inquisition tribunal after 1560), although others questioned lived in the parishes surrounding Rialto and San Marco: Battista at San Zulian, Andrea the beltmaker at San Lio, Zuane spagnoletto at San Cassan, in the heart of the redlight district south of Rialto, Giacomo Angelo degli Urani at San Geminiano. 31 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, cc. 24v–25. 32 On the mobility of migrants through the city, see Philippe Braunstein, ‘Cannaregio, zona di transito?’ in D. Calabi and P. Lanaro (eds), La città italiana e i luoghi degli stranieri. XIV—XVIII secolo (Rome, 1998), pp. 52–62. 33 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 32, fasc. ‘Bortholamio Grison’, c. 2v. On degrees of foreignness within the Venetian popolani, see Claire Judde de Larivière and Rosa Salzberg, ‘Le peuple est la cité. L’idée de popolo et la condition des popolani

150  Rosa M. Salzberg à Venise (XVe–XVIe siècles)’, Annales HSS 68 (2013), 1136–39; Ermanno Orlando, Migrazioni mediterranee. Migranti, minoranze e matrimoni a Venezia nel basso medioevo (Bologna, 2014). 34 ‘E’l vende sul ponte de Rialto come fazzo mi’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, c. 14v. 35 ‘E’l cognosco perche el vende su’l ponte da Rialto come vendo mi, et so dove e’l sta’. Ibid., c. 3. Another witness, Francesco, a maker of laces, also said that he had known Battista for five or six years ‘perche e’l vende et prattica su’l ponte de Rialto come fazzo anche mi’ (cc. 15–15v). 36 Ibid., cc. 27–27v. Giacomo Angelo was forced to abjure his heretical beliefs in 1566. See ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 21, fasc. ‘Contra Maximum de Maximis Ingenierium et Complices’. 37 ‘Un’altra volta dalla sensa vendeva delle mie robbe appresso di lui sula fondamenta del ponte della paia . . . ‘; ‘Assai volte vendendo sul ponte di Rialto havemo ragionato insieme’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, cc. 15v, 27v. 38 Ibid., cc. 4, 23. 39 ‘Uno maestro Zuane spagnoletto che vende corone per piazza, et su’l ponte di Rialto et per la fundamenta del ponte della pag[l]ia et l’altro maestro Franco, che vende cordoni da camise nei prefato luoghi, et il terzo è chiamato Bezzeto che fa pironi, et vende per li ditti luoghi’. Ibid., c. 9. 40 ‘Da un ca[p]o all’altro de Rialto l’è tenuto per heretico’. Ibid., c. 15. On the importance of gossip in constructing fama, see Elizabeth Horodowich, ‘The Gossiping Tongue: Oral Networks, Public Life and Political Culture in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies 19 (2005), 22–45. 41 ‘Che fama ha questo capeller su’l ponte de Rialto? . . . L’ha fama de lutheran’; ‘Appresso tutti quelli che stanno et vendeno sul ponte di Rialto, et fino li putti che vendono là li cridano driedo Lutherano’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, cc. 2v, 16. Another witness accorded that ‘Per voce et fama m’è stato ditto che [Battista] è lutherano’ (c. 15v). See also cc. 16v, 17, 25v, for similar opinions. On ordinary people criticising those they perceived as heretics in the neighbourhood, workplace, or home, see Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, pp. 64–5. 42 ‘Da poi che io pratico su’l ponte de Rialto, che sono otto anni ho inteso a dir che questo Battista quanto ho ditto cioè che l’era ugonotto, et de Prospero è’l si diceva il medesimo perchè pratticava con questo Battista dapoi che esso Prospero venne a vender sul ditto ponte che può esser tre o quattro anni in circa’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, cc. 25v–26. The alcohol pedlar, Bartolomeo Grison, also developed a negative reputation among local workers, described disparagingly by another Rialto seller as being ‘drunk every three days on that water of his’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 32, fasc. ‘Bortholamio Grison’, cc. 2–3v. 43 Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, pp. 15–16. Although on the case of a journeyman printer labelled by a co-worker as a ‘Huguenot’ because he was French, see ibid., p. 190. Coined around the 1550s, the word Huguenot was still being used interchangeably with Luthérien in France in this period; Janet G. Gray, ‘The Origin of the Word Huguenot’, Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (1983), 353. 44 ‘La Madonna guarisse a poco a poco; menelo un’altra volta, che’l ghe vederà meglio’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, c. 16v. 45 Ibid., cc. 12v–13v. cf. Clive Griffin, Journeymen-Printers, Heresy, and the Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 32–3, on the ‘bush telegraph’ that operated between mobile printing workers in Spain in this period, regarding Inquisition arrests.

The Margins in the Centre  151 46 Andrea Zannini, ‘L’identità multipla: Essere popolo in una capitale (Venezia, sec. XVI–XVIII)’, Ricerche storiche 32, special issue 2–3: Essere popolo: Prerogative e rituali d’appartenenza nelle citta italiane d’antico regime (2002), 252–3. Nonetheless, when Prospero disappeared from his usual selling spot for a few days—allegedly to go to sell at the fairs, but probably also to avoid questioning by the Holy Office—others noticed his absence. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, c. 5v. 47 Ibid., c. 2v. On Italian fairs, see Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance, pp. 166–84. 48 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, cc. 34–34v. Battista also said that he went often to the regions of Brescia and Bergamo to sell (c. 35v). On the frequent mobility of working people in early modern Europe, see Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans. Migration in Western Europe Since 1650 (Bloomington IN, 1992); Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago IL and London, 2006). 49 Cf. the case of Andrea da Gambarare, an itinerant mercer and then beggar who travelled all over northern Italy and eventually to Geneva to meet up with other Protestants, transmitting letters and texts. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, b. 24, fasc. 11. 50 De Vivo, Information and Communication, pp. 89–94. 51 ‘Vestito con capa vechia et mal in ordine’ (Prospero); ‘una cappa stracciato et molto mal in ordine’ (Battista); ‘con un tabareto da pover’homo’ (Zuane). ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, cc. 4, 9, 11. 52 ‘Ho sette fioli da far le spese et son poveretto come Ioppo’. Ibid., c. 11v. For Prospero’s claim, see c. 10v. 53 ‘Aggravato et circondato de molte miserie’. Ibid., c. 24v. ‘Acciò non moriamo dalla fame’. Ibid., unnumbered sheet dated 10 April 1573. 54 ‘Che volete che habbia invitato alcuno perchè non ho tanti soldi che possa andar a Mestre’. Ibid., c. 31. 55 Ibid., cc. 22–22v. For other, similar examples, like the poor and illiterate Bartolomeo da Sabbio, a former printshop worker caught selling prohibited secondhand books at Rialto in 1574, see Salzberg, ‘Selling Stories’, pp. 747–8. 56 See Maria Serena Mazzi, ‘Ai margini del lavoro: i mestieri per ‘campare la vita’ in Claire Dolan (ed.), Travail et travailleurs en Europe au Moyen Âge et au début des temps modernes (Toronto, 1991), especially pp. 260–61. 57 ‘Li lutherani sono migliori, et più charitativi che noi, perchè si amano insieme, et fanno delle limosine, et mettono à commun fra loro’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, c. 17. Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, pp. 158–9, describes Battista’s views as representative of the evangelism typical of skilled, independant artisans, but they seem closer to the Anabaptist ideas that Martin describes as appealing particularly to poorer and illiterate workers (pp. 174–5). 58 ‘L’ho sentito a dir da lui et da altri, che i signori sono cani tiranni, et che assassinano i populi, et i poveri . . . sento per la via dir queste cose et molti si lamentano’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, c. 21. 59 Ibid., c. 15. 60 Ibid., cc. 30–30v, 37, 43. 61 Ibid., cc. 28v–29. The hatter also claimed to be a cousin of the humanist and reformist writer Marcantonio Flaminio (1479–1550), whose family was from Bologna, but this was not explored further in the trial and probably considered unlikely by the Inquisitors (c. 7v). On cases centring on Venetian inns or taverns, see Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, pp. 170–72. 62 ASV, busta 21, fasc. ‘Contra Maximum de Maximis Ingenierium et Complices’, cc. 5v, 10, 18v (September 1566).

152  Rosa M. Salzberg 63 ‘Son dodeci anni che sto alla porta della chiesa di San Salvador, a dimandar limosina, et intendendo predicare de tanti padri homeni da bene santi che provavano per le scritture l’autorità del Papa, purgatorio, et le altre cose . . . Et così mi son riduto alla buona strada, et alla verità’. ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, c. 50v. On Piero’s opinions and social contacts in the area, see cc. 44v–50. 64 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, busta 33, fasc. ‘Prosperum Capellarium’, unnumbered sheets dated 12 October 1573. 65 Ibid., c. 41. 66 See Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, Chapter 8. 67 See Judde de Larivière and Salzberg, ‘Le peuple est la cité’. 68 Renzo Derosas, ‘Moralità e giustizia a Venezia nel ’500—’600: gli esecutori contro la bestemmia’ in G. Cozzi (ed.), Stato, società e giustizia nella repubblica veneta (sec. xv–xviii) (Rome, 1980), pp. 451–52.

Part IV

Morality and the Home

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9 Cleaning up the Renaissance City The Symbolic and Physical Place of the Genoese Brothel in Urban Society* Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw

In 1556, a notary, Francesco Frugoni, addressed a supplication to the Genoese government about an area of land in his possession.1 The plot was situated in the garden which lay behind his home in San Nicolo Castelletto. The empty, ‘mountainous’, ‘rocky’ lot was described as wasted and dangerous. The area was a place of commotion, as a result of the children and youths who congregated there, and indecency, caused by their games and the presence of prostitutes (per pueros et iuvenes discolos exerceant’ corpia et inhonesta tam circa ludum quam mulieres). In times of rainfall, rubble and rubbish were washed down into the much-prized port of the city. By early modern standards, this was a miserable site: noise, rubbish, and immorality combined to make the terrain filthy in the broadest sense. At the time of the supplication, the area of the city about which Francesco Frugoni was writing was undergoing a fascinating redevelopment. It was adjacent to the site where Genoa’s widely celebrated Renaissance masterpiece, the strada nuova, was being constructed during the 1550s and 1560s.2 Described by George Gorse as ‘a classical stage for the old nobility’, this imposing thoroughfare has been portrayed as ‘the major public presentation space for the regime these families led’ and an exercise in public magnificence.3 The urban redevelopment was co-ordinated by the government; the profits made by selling off plots of land were used to fund much-needed investment in the city’s cathedral of San Lorenzo. The palaces of the strada nuova, therefore, magnified both temporal and spiritual power in Renaissance Genoa. Frugoni’s plot of land was not the only insalubrious site in the vicinity of the new strada nuova. Taking a somewhat incongruous centre-stage in the construction process of this Renaissance street was Genoa’s municipal brothel, notably as an institution which had to be relocated. As a result, discussions about magnificent urban space became interwoven with others about the social, religious, and environmental effects of the presence of prostitutes in Renaissance Genoa. This chapter will use these discussions, alongside statutes which were intended to regulate the brothel and its inhabitants, to consider the changing place and perception of Genoa’s prostitutes during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These women occupied an ambiguous place within the city throughout this period, although the reasons for their

156  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw marginality changed over time. We will consider, first, the attempts made to identify the city’s prostitutes and define the space of the brothel within the medieval port city. Second, we will explore the responses of contemporaries such as Frugoni about the impact of the building of the strada nuova and the relocation of the brothel into the city’s Castelletto during the sixteenth century. Gorse has described the Castelletto area as being characterized by ‘accessibility yet remoteness . . . as a peripheral and largely abandoned and uncontested space’, and yet the proposed relocation of the brothel to the Castelletto neighbourhood sparked a lively debate. In particular, a petition from the friars of San Francesco di Castelletto employed vivid imagery to express disgust at the anticipated impact of their new neighbours, including that of sanctity and profanity, as well as cleanliness and filth. In the concluding section of the chapter, the connections which contemporaries, both secular and religious, drew between sin, dirt, and disease will be emphasized. These correspondences hold a broader significance because they provided a foundation for Renaissance conceptualizations of the relationship between people and place.4

I  Defining the Brothel The official place of brothels in medieval and Renaissance Europe has been widely studied.5 The institution played an important economic, social, and moral role, as considered in more detail below. Urban governments often developed brothels within city walls, although sometimes they were assigned an extramural location.6 Regardless of the precise area chosen, there was an early and widespread attempt to establish a designed place for prostitutes to work within cities, in part to ensure effective financial control of this space as a potentially valuable source of income for the state. As noted in the introduction to this volume, historical writing on prostitution has been one of the few areas of study of life on the margins to recognize the mutable nature of the occupation. Changing economic conditions, whether at different stages in the life cycle or because of external factors, meant that women might engage in prostitution in a cyclical, temporary manner. It has been equally widely acknowledged that authorities struggled to regulate brothels, in part because of this changing complexion of the trade. In her article on the topography of prostitution in Renaissance Ferrara, Diane Ghirardo observes that it was not the immoral activities of prostitutes which preoccupied civic authorities but the ‘conjunction of space and sex’.7 In other words, having demarcated a place for the trade, the authorities’ concern was to confine it. As a result, prostitution is well placed to provide a case study regarding the relationship between marginality and space. If this is true in general, the specific case of Renaissance Genoa and the relocation of its brothel make this port city a rich setting for such an exploration. Despite the fascinating context in which it flourished, prostitution in Genoa has received relatively little attention.8 The most detailed consideration of

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  157 the Genoese brothel has come in the pioneering publications on the city’s strada nuova by Ennio Poleggi and George Gorse.9 The focus of both these studies, however, was on the street which was constructed, and its role in shaping Genoese civic and noble identities, rather than on the brothel itself.10 Diane Ghirardo has noted that female spaces, particularly sites such as brothels, are largely neglected in extant studies of Italian Renaissance cities in favour of palaces and ‘glittering’ courts.11 In Genoa, the coincidence of these two types of urban development means that the home of the city’s prostitutes has secured a more prominent place for posterity in the archival documentation of the Genoese Republic than it might otherwise have done. Much of this archival material survives in the records of the Padri del Comune (literally ‘fathers of the comune’), the department of the Genoese government to which Francesco Frugoni sent the supplication with which this chapter began.12 Frugoni assumed that the concerns he had regarding the environment of his neighbourhood would also be perceived as problematic by this magistracy. He emphasized its wasted state, since he was hoping to sell the plot in question and required official permission to do so. The Padri del Comune had wide-ranging responsibilities, primarily directed towards the port and harbourfront (molo), but which also extended outwards to encompass the city’s streets and water supply.13 By the fifteenth century, the office of the Padri was responsible for the cleanliness and maintenance of streets, the viability of communication routes, and the removal of dangerous or damaged buildings, as well as any domestic or trade structures that extended into public space, such as external staircases, gutters (grondaie) and entablatures (cornicioni troppo sporgenti). It was entrusted with the regulation of the College of Physicians and Apothecaries and, from 1529, other trades after the former ‘viceduci’ were abolished in the previous year. Notably, the Padri was also given the responsibility for regulating prostitution within the city. It was not uncommon for government magistracies to assume such broad remits and punish sins as well as crimes, and control space as well as society. In Siena, for example, the fifteenth-century magistracy of the Regolatori exercised authority over urban health issues relating to streets and bridges, as well as moral and social problems, such as sodomy and prostitution.14 Part of the reason for the inclusion of prostitution among the Padri’s responsibilities, and those of other comparable magistracies elsewhere, was undoubtedly financial.15 The Padri obtained funding from a variety of sources, including the brothel; such sums were used to finance important public works.16 Prostitutes paid a daily rate of five soldi for the right to live and work in the brothel, except during periods of sickness, which inhibited their ability to ply their trade.17 In addition to these fees, the Padri received fines which were imposed as punishments for misdemeanours within the brothel by both men and women. The statutes which governed the conduct of public prostitutes make clear that, in two of the four regulations which concerned female behaviour, fines were to be paid and this money was to

158  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw be used for communal benefit to fund the works at the port and harbour.18 The collector of the gabella in the brothel was entrusted both with handling financial payments and for regulating behaviour; indeed, a number of cases survive of denunciations of prostitutes by this administrator. As Paola Massa Piergiovanni has pointed out, income from the brothel was an important stream of revenue for the state during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century but declined from the 1490s.19 Indeed, this decline may have underpinned the transfer of some of the jurisdiction of the brothel to the Collegi dei Procuratori in 1545.20 Even in 1554, however, the Padri recognized the potential for the brothel to yield a source of income which was sufficiently high to be of interest to fraudsters as well as government officials. A proclamation warned prostitutes that their payments for the coming year should be made to the officially appointed gabella collector, Baptista Piturno, and not to any other individual who might attempt to exact the tax, otherwise the women might well end up having to pay twice.21 The records of the Padri, then, are an obvious place to turn in order to explore the history of Genoa’s prostitutes from the fifteenth until the midsixteenth century. Surviving material includes statutes, records of denunciations, and documentation concerning the development of the strada nuova. In the surviving statutes, there is a clear emphasis on the control of space and language, the former constraint being more prominent than the latter. Both issues will be considered below, beginning with an exploration of the area of the brothel and of attempts made by the authorities to define acceptable behaviour both inside and outside its walls. In contrast to other Italian cities, Genoa only had one municipal brothel.22 It had been set up in 1336, with its own official (Podestà) for regulation.23 It was located on the hill of Montalbano within the walls at the northern edge of the city.24 The disused city gate of Portello was nearby. The hillside was home to the poor district of Santa Maria Maddalena and its church. Steven Epstein describes this area in 1400 as containing a number of welfare institutions, such as the hospital at Santa Maria Maddalena, which served the blind, and that of San Francesco for foundlings. None of the noble families was said to dominate this less affluent neighbourhood as they did in the alberghi elsewhere in Genoa.25 One of the city’s fourteen baths was located here, along with a small square which contained the public fountain of Fontana Morosa.26 It was in a ‘periphery inhabited by the populace’, especially weavers, dyers, and tailors, and was further marked by its proximity to the city slaughterhouses.27 Nevertheless, it lay only a relatively short distance by foot from the Doge’s Palace and cathedral. In this regard, it corresponded with the recommended place of brothels in Renaissance architectural treatises, which emphasized ‘accessibility, invisibility and control’ in the location of such places.28 The three ideals of accessibility, invisibility, and control can also be identified in the regulation of Genoese prostitution. The brothel was intended to be clearly defined and confining. It was described as a walled area, which

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  159 was locked, akin to a fortress (intra muros et clausuras loci montis albani). Anyone identified as a prostitute or pimp (meretrices venales et publicas rofianas) was to be transported to the brothel, unless they chose to leave the city and its suburbs within five days. Nor were these individuals permitted to return unless it was to the brothel at Montalbano. Once resident there, the women were forbidden in Genoa, as in other Italian cities, from circulating freely in the city, except on a Saturday, which was described in the regulations as ‘the day granted to them’.29 This tradition may have been both practical and symbolic. Saturday would often have been the market day, when supplies would have been readily available for these women. In addition, though, much like the customary requirement for streets to be swept in front of homes, it may have been part of symbolic cleaning which prepared the city for the Sabbath. Saturday was not adopted everywhere for this purpose, however. In the nearby Ligurian port of Savona, prostitutes were only permitted to enter the city and the city’s numerous public baths on Friday. Such draconian spatial constraints were unusual even in the context of social groups perceived as potentially dangerous. Other groups were prevented from accessing the city freely at night but it was rare to employ such extensive policies of exclusion. Diane Ghirardo has written, ‘of all professions only prostitutes confronted legal constraints on their movement through and presence in city streets’.30 This was a matter which was taken so seriously in Genoa that potential transgressors of the prohibition on movement beyond the brothel were not offered the option of a fine if they were found guilty; they would invariably be subjected to physical punishment. In addition to restricting their access to public space, the Padri attempted to regulate the visibility of prostitutes. They were instructed not to venture beyond the gate close to the confraternity of San Francesco and the Elefante inn between dawn and dusk (described in the regulations as the period between the Ave Maria matutini bell and the ‘late bells’ (campane serotini)).31 In 1496, they were ordered to remain within the ‘two scarini above the majesty of the Virgin Mary’, providing a fleeting indication of the material culture of this space.32 The brothel was intended to enclose these women. In 1540 they were reminded not to loiter in the streets or alleys or in the doorways of their habitations but remain inside.33 It is interesting to note that, although Genoa is the city credited with the first sumptuary law (in 1157), Hughes has argued that the clothing of the city’s prostitutes was not a target for legislation as it was elsewhere; instead, the government limited itself to spatial solutions to the problem of visibility.34 Visitors were forbidden from entering the brothel except through the main door.35 Clearly, it was feared that surreptitious visits were being made by men climbing the walls. This was a measure which was as much about ensuring financial profit as moral well-being. Indeed, many of the regulations on movement were partly fiscal measures. When the official rang the brothel bell in the evening, all clients were instructed to leave, unless they

160  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw wished to spend the night, which might be done with the permission of the official and on payment of between six and twelve denari.36 The mention of the official’s bell is notable. The statutes describe time in the brothel, as in the wider city, as being regulated by church bells. The brothel was located close to churches, while one of the city’s great clocks sounded the hours at the Castelletto; the passage of time would have been clearly heard.37 It is not entirely clear why the official in charge of the brothel was instructed to hang a bell (campanellam) within the complex, but this was also done in Renaissance marketplaces to regulate the hours of commerce. It may have been that this was an attempt to articulate the unity of the space, much as it was intended to impose jurisdictional coherence on the brothel as a place within which punishments for the prostitutes were proclaimed and enacted.38 Further statutes which addressed behaviour in order to protect the Republic’s income included restrictions on travel. Clients were prohibited from removing women from the brothel, whether openly or secretly, as also were the procurers of prostitutes. The city’s boatmen, moreover, were forbidden from taking prostitutes from any bridge in the port to any location without express licence from the Padri.39 Steven Epstein has suggested that this regulation infers that officially endorsed shiploads of prostitutes were sent to the harbour, ‘apparently to work on the docks or elsewhere. Barges of prostitutes servicing crews with the state’s permission—it is hard to imagine a more degrading occupation’.40 The regulation of transportation, again, therefore, seems to have been less a moral concern and more intended to secure financial protection for the state, which derived a significant from this valuable trade. Some aspects of the regulation of prostitution, however, were decidedly moral. The brothel served its overriding social purpose only when it removed a potential source of sexual temptation from common view. Concern about the ubiquity of prostitutes, particularly in or near the homes of the city’s inhabitants, was frequently articulated. Prohibitions on the movement of prostitutes were intended to protect the space of the home and the confluent institutions of marriage and the family. In the regulations of the brothel, it was noted that prostitutes and the presence of male and female brothel keepers encouraged adultery or carnal intercourse, which were both dishonest and against the law.41 In the city’s criminal statutes, prostitutes (meretrix) and brothel keepers (leno vel lena) were instructed not to inhabit residential areas in which reputable people (boni viri) lived.42 The authorities expected neighbours to denounce any suspects as a way of demarcating ‘respectable’ zones and reinforcing ideals of community. The testimony of two or three ‘respectable’ men or women was considered sufficient proof of being either a prostitute or brothel keeper. Equally, any woman who wished to leave the brothel in order to live an honest life had not only to satisfy the necessary requirements and ensure that all financial matters were settled, but also refrain from approaching, let alone entering, the brothel by day or by night.

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  161 Banned from the households of Renaissance Genoa, prostitutes and brothel keepers were nevertheless allowed a carefully regulated place within the family of the Church and its parish space. It is unclear whether the location of worship was prescribed for the prostitutes of Genoa: the church of Santa Maria Maddalena lay in the vicinity of the brothel. We do know, however, that the time spent within sacred spaces was carefully monitored. Prostitutes and brothel keepers were forbidden from lingering in churches and cemeteries within the city and suburbs after the morning celebration of High Mass (post magnam missam). The citizens were required to denounce any failure to adhere to these rules. Testimony from two married men with respectable wives (duorum hominum vel mulierum bone) would be enough to convince the authorities that these regulations had been transgressed. Elsewhere in Europe, prostitutes were permitted to confess once a year (the minimal canonical requirement) and to visit a church on a weekly basis ‘to light a candle and pray, though they were not allowed to receive the sacraments’.43 It was deemed important to allow these women access to sacred spaces, where they might repent of their sinful lives, whilst ensuring that their presence did not tempt other worshipers to stray. It is clear from a number of surviving sources that, despite these efforts, contemporaries did not believe prostitutes or prostitution to be confined to the brothel. In some instances near neighbours were concerned about soliciting beyond the walls of the site. For example, in 1533, a number of individuals living close to the vico della Maddalena complained to the Padri that Pietro Bargagli had been renting a private house to prostitutes. The attraction for prostitutes of living in the vicinity of the brothel without having to pay the gabella presumably reinforced their suspicion. In his response, Bargagli claimed to have leased his property to soldiers.44 A location close to the brothel could certainly have appealed to soldiers, and such a defence might well have convinced the government authorities. These cases were not only concerned with the zone immediately surrounding the brothel; however, a second complaint in the same year related to the carrubbio Pizzacurlo (in S. Ambrogio).45 In addition to defining the space inhabited by prostitutes, the Genoese government attempted to regulate the activities which took place within and beyond the brothel. In Ferrara the behaviour of prostitutes was also addressed, but the focus there was primarily upon the conduct of those who ventured into the city itself.46 In their overview article on the place of marginal groups in medieval urban society, Mummey and Reyerson have urged that the ‘relationship between marginal populations and the sights, sounds and smells of the medieval city merits study’.47 In the case of the Genoese brothel, it is interesting to note that such sights and sounds were a particular focus of the statutes. All public prostitutes were forbidden from blasphemy, particularly against the Virgin Mary.48 Indeed, in the lengthy regulations of 1471, the list of prohibitions comprised Christ, the glorious Virgin Mary, and any other saints.49 It was emphasized that this regulation applied both

162  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw within the brothel at Montalbano and in the city. The desire to curb noise, as well as the physical impact of violence, no doubt, underpinned the rules forbidding brawls.50 There is a strong impression of attempts being made to preserve honour, since the prohibition on brawls was combined with one on jeering. Prostitutes were forbidden from causing trouble or insulting men within the brothel (molestia aut contumeliam), and in the following year, they were reminded not to offend or abuse (villania) the government official in charge.51 In a subsequent proclamation, the collector of the gabella was singled out as being in need of protection from the words and deeds of these truculent women.52 The brothel also served to define female honour in a number of ways. Women outside the institution could frame their sexual behaviour in antithesis to the licentious activities of those within. It is engaging to note, however, that the opportunity to work there was not open to everyone. In 1469 the official in charge was reminded that married women could not be public prostitutes (aliquam mulierem habentem maritum que non sit publica et venalis meretrix). This particular restriction reflected the broader social and moral purpose of the brothel; it was essential not to confuse fornication with adultery. In contrast to other cities in Southern Europe, such as Valencia, prostitution by slaves was officially discouraged in Genoa by the prohibition on the admission of slaves into the brothel.53 Steven Epstein has drawn suggestive parallels between prostitutes and slaves. He noted that ‘there must have been unfathomable tensions between the prostitutes who worked around Castelletto, really temporary slaves, and the high-priced and well-cared-for women who lived in the palaces of the nobles and wealthy popolo’, emphasizing that the cost of a slave during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries could be higher than that of a house.54 The restriction on the employment of slaves within the brothel was enacted in order to prevent women from being forced into the trade: masters could not compel their slaves to work as prostitutes, although, as Epstein notes, female servants were exploited in the domestic sphere.55 Concern about women being compelled, manipulated, or blackmailed into prostitution was reiterated in 1471, when the Genoese government issued a proclamation forbidding the illicit subjection of women in this way.56 The sale of women into prostitution was henceforward prohibited to everyone—whether male or female, of whatever social status, whether working openly or furtively, for themselves or through an intermediary—regardless of the sum of money involved. Brothels might claim to protect women as well as serving to purify society more broadly. Prostitutes were provided with a secure place of residence and a bed (domum et lectum secundum morem et consuetudinem dicti loci). The official of the Genoese brothel was responsible for ensuring that the statutes were followed, the women were kept safe and were not coerced to work in ways which appeared unacceptable. The statutes also prevented them from being forced to work during periods of sickness.57 The brothel was a space within which men were forbidden from carrying arms, for either defensive

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  163 or offensive purposes.58 An official and his two servants, or guards, were employed to keep order on behalf of the brothel and were alone permitted to bear weapons.59 It was thought to be safer for these women to live within the state-regulated brothel, where they were provided with accommodation and armed protection when needed, than alone in the wider city. The unequivocal nature of the statutes, however, can mask the difficulties of defining prostitution in practice.60 The official term used in Genoa, as elsewhere in Europe, of meretrix publica was unambiguous with regard to its legal standing.61 The identification of a meretrix publica was more complex when it concerned women working outside the brothel. During the medieval and early modern periods, unacceptable female behaviour was often denounced in the language of sexual immorality, which complicates any attempt to identify prostitutes by their reputations.62 From a fragment of a surviving criminal record from Savona in 1204 and 1205, Steven Epstein has documented a fascinating exchange which took place between two women in the street. One was said to have hit the other on the head with a rapagula (a stone block from a sewer or watercourse) and called her ‘a prencessa (‘princess’, slang for prostitute), a mala ancilla (bad servant), and bagassa (whore, dialect of bagascia)’. The altercation took place at the beginning of Lent and involved, alongside the insulting language and physical assault, an accusation concerning the theft of jewellery.63 Among the multiple factors which constituted female honour, sexual conduct was a significant target in the context of contestation.64 Further hints at the distance which separated ideals from reality are often gleaned by historians from the frequency with which regulations were reiterated. The rules of the Genoese brothel were intended to be proclaimed at least four times every year. This may have been because prostitutes were often foreigners and there was a relatively high level of change in the personnel of the brothel. Most would also be illiterate.65 The statutes were read in their entirety which, perhaps, acts as a reminder of the important role that the citizens were thought to play in identifying and dealing with prostitution. Certain regulations were reiterated in isolation; for example, the reminder that public prostitutes could only leave the brothel on Saturdays was oft repeated. Here, it is likely that a perceived lack of enforcement and obedience underpinned such regular proclamations. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, Genoa’s brothel was relocated in 1551–52 to clear the way for the building of the strada nuova during the 1550s and subsequent decades. In 1554, only two years after the collection of the gabella of the new brothel was opened to tender, the Padri noted that the medieval statutes had been contravened so frequently, causing disorder throughout the brothel and the wider city that they ought to be reissued.66 The new regulations began, first, with the same restrictions on space and movement as the earlier version and, second, with a prohibition on blasphemy. The third and fourth clauses related to the gabella. They followed the same format as before, making it clear that there was little change

164  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw in the underlying ideas about the regulation of prostitution within the city. Instead, the office of the Padri concerned itself with effective communication, in order to ensure that the elements of the fifteenth-century regulations which endured into the sixteenth century (particularly the clauses relating to space, language, and money) were more rigorously observed.67 The official aims in the regulation of prostitution may be characterized largely in terms of continuity. The place allocated to these women within the city, however, changed in the mid-sixteenth century and the decision to build the strada nuova in the area of the former brothel casts an interesting light on the idea of marginal or polluted space, which will be explored in the following section.

II  Redefining the Brothel The protracted construction process for the strada nuova had a detrimental effect on a large urban area, as described by Francesco Frugoni in the supplication with which this chapter began. In addition to the brothel, the Padri appropriated ‘thirty-eight houses, twenty-two small urban gardens, a dye works, a public square and a courtyard for ball-playing for the most part occupied by the poorer classes’.68 The strada nuova was commissioned during a period of rapid urban growth. Although a small city compared with others on the Italian peninsula, Genoa’s population expanded during the sixteenth century from approximately 45,000 people in 1450 to 51,130 in 1531 and 70,000 in 1570.69 The attendant demand for space led to the transformation of particular zones. Unlike cities elsewhere, Genoa did not engage in a process of land reclamation but remained constrained by its medieval city walls, which were reinforced but not extended until the seventeenth century.70 Within this context of urban change, and at a time of considerable political and religious reform, it is notable that care was taken to relocate the brothel, despite the aforementioned decline in income.71 The women may have become less significant financially but continued to discharge a moral and social function. When considering change over time in the responses to prostitution, it is important to recognize that a spatial solution was thought to solve a number of different problems. It would be misleading to portray the institutional changes in early modern Genoa as a straightforward, coordinated communal effort. Indeed, the original motivation for the relocation of the city’s prostitutes was technically the result of a private rather than a public initiative. In 1549–51 a group of nobles sent a petition to the Republic, as Gorse has noted, to clear the way for a monumental street. This followed the customary sequence for urban development in Genoa, whereby a private petition would be sent to the Padri, and then be copied to the Senate. The response of this body was, in turn, communicated to the Padri, which would commission an investigation by its ufficio tecnico, report back to the Senate, issue a proclamation which invited the population to register any opposition, conduct a final

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  165 examination and communicate a decision by decree.72 In the case of the strada nuova, the petition was approved on 17 March 1550 and a year later, on 13 March 1551, the transfer of the brothel to the site of the ruined Castelletto was agreed.73 According to the supplication of the builder Bernardo da Cabio, work in the area of the Castelletto was carried out during the summer of 1551, on the brothel and on streets leading to San Nicolo and San Francesco.74 In June 1552 the Padri opened the tender for the contract for the gabella of the new brothel, stating in the proclamation that it had already been built. The new site was the Castelletto—a twelfth-century fortress which had been pulled down in 1528, during Andrea Doria’s revolt against the French, as a symbol of foreign tyranny. It lay in an area of the city which had been badly damaged as a result of the turbulent political history of the Genoese Republic during the medieval period.75 Poleggi notes that, because of sustained military activity, most of the area around the Castelletto was scorched (brucciata) and that the Padri commissioned a register (estimo) of houses in this area that appeared to have been destroyed (distrutte) or badly damaged (semidistrutte). These campaigns had caused the church of San Francesco di Castelletto to be abandoned in 1507, only to be occupied again in 1537.76 The choice of the ruined Castelletto as the site for the new brothel introduces some interesting symbolism; it would undoubtedly be overstating the case to employ the language of dominance, but there was a sense of the architectural appropriateness of building upon a former fortress. The metaphor of the castle was used elsewhere to represent a brothel, being also applied to a variety of other institutions in early modern cities, the function of which bridged economic, religious, social, and medical controls.77 In a decree of 1551, government officials stated explicitly why it was that they considered the site at the Castelletto to be suited to use as a brothel. They emphasized that it was sufficiently remote and, as will be considered in more detail below, that it was a healthy place with a good supply of fresh air, light, and water. It also lay at the juncture of a number of roads.78 In the centre of the complex was an enclosure containing rooms for the prostitutes, along with an inn. The number is unclear; in Ferrara, an ‘optimum’ capacity was said to comprise twenty-five rooms with an inn in the middle, and it may well be that the Genoese brothel was planned on a similar scale. In the proclamation which invited tenders for the gabella and the rent of the licence for the inn (appishonare (appisionar) detta hostaria) the prostitutes’ rooms were described as comfortable (accommodate) and the inn as extremely comfortable (accomodantissima).79 There was also said to be an enormous cistern which would never dry up (una zisterna grandissima che mai non manca). The emphasis on salubriousness in the description of the site is notable. Perhaps the government authorities wanted to stress that the presence of these women would not pose a risk to the health of their neighbours, or the intention was to ensure that the highest possible value would be placed on the contract.

166  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw In the end, however, one of the key features in favour of the use of the Castelletto site must have been its relatively low cost.80 It was made clear by the Padri that the relocation of the brothel should place the least possible drain on the public purse. Costs were minimized in a number of different ways. In 1551, the Padri made building materials from the ruined Castelletto available to those constructing palaces on the strada nuova, presumably as an effective way of clearing the area; it was noted that the Padri would retain any building material that might prove useful to them.81 Such measures seem to have been effective and the redevelopment was successful in yielding funding from the sale of plots of land. In 1558, the Padri noted the purposes to which the money would be put: for repairs and building works at the cathedral of San Lorenzo, for development of the seawall within the port, for the festivities of Corpus Domini and for the public aqueduct.82 In 1551, the development of the strada nuova was described as something which would serve as an ornament to the city and benefit many, particularly in the support that it provided for the cathedral.83 Yet, as the next section will show, the language of profanity, as well as sanctity, was used in a wide-ranging manner in descriptions of the complex relationships between Genoa’s prostitutes and their new neighbours in the area of the Castelletto.

III  Defining Sanctity The proposed relocation of the city’s brothel from the vicinity of the Morosa fountain to the Castelletto was far from uncontroversial. Poleggi provides a list of twenty-eight individuals who recorded their objections formally with the Padri, although it tells us little about their place of residence or reasons for opposition. Only in one case, that of Filippo Lomelino, who is described as a Procurator of San Nicolo, are we told that he considered the proposal to be harmful, scandalous, and contrary to the honour of God (contra honorem Dei et esse periculum scandali).84 The most vociferous complaint came from the friars of San Francesco di Castelletto. Their petition was carefully worded: it was not, they stressed, an attempt to give advice to the Senate but to reopen the discussion regarding the relocation.85 The document is worth considering in detail for the ways in which concepts of sanctity and profanity, as well as cleanliness and filth, were intertwined in this reflection on the relationship between people and their neighbourhood. San Francesco di Castelletto was the Conventual Franciscan church and convent of Genoa. It was a large and beautiful building complex, mostly destroyed during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It was an important site of learning and was, according to Giorgio Rossini, one of the most salient points of reference of the medieval city.86 As Caroline Bruzelius has observed in the context of late medieval Italian cities, Franciscan friars often lived in insalubrious places: ‘mendicant institutions redirected attention and focus towards the urban periphery’, often straddling city walls or in swampy, low-lying areas.87 Their presence was intended to represent a commitment

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  167 to poverty but, in common with other Franciscan churches, San Francesco di Castelletto benefited from the permission granted in 1250 by Pope Innocent IV to accept for burial those from outside the order. It became a site of monuments to numerous wealthy Genoese, as well as one particular famous foreigner: Margaret of Brabant (1276–1311), wife of Emperor Henry VII (1275–1313), whose beautiful tomb was made by Giovanni Pisano (c.1250– c.1315).88 Studies of the chapels and records of anniversary masses illustrate how integrated the church became into the broader social and commemorative networks of the city.89 As was the case in many Genoese institutions, the patronage of the church was not limited to a single family; indeed, the district was beyond the control of a single, noble albergo. This was an institution which could claim a far wider civic significance, which added weight to the complaint regarding the brothel. The imagery deployed in the friars’ petition was stark and the focus for complaint was broad: moral, physical, and financial.90 They protested that the relocation of the brothel would cause damage, dishonour and shame (danno dishonor et vergogna) to the church, as well as the people living nearby. The supplication stated that a great deal of money and effort had been expended to develop Genoa’s religious institutions, much having been given by the leading families of the city. The friars attributed this programme of investment to the Republic itself (da questa eccelsa Republica) and claimed that its purpose was to create a space designed only for those those who had dedicated themselves to God (‘solo per habitation di persone consecreate a Idio’ [my emphasis]. They drew a sharp contrast between the places set aside for the members of their own religious order and others at San Nicoloso, San Bernardo, and San Bartolomeo, and what they described as the homes and marketplace of the infamous, lascivious, and dishonest individuals (habitationi et publico mercato di persone infami lascive et dishoneste) who would be drawn into the neighbourhood. Despite these special claims, the friars also wrote on behalf of their secular neighbours and reflected upon the impact of prostitution on the family life of ordinary citizens. Families, they noted, would be deeply affected by the new brothel, particularly women and children. Caroline Bruzelius has emphasized, in the context of medieval Franciscan and Dominican orders, that one of the specific features of their work was conspicuous activity in public and private spaces, including the home. Such ‘close links’ between families and friars, she argues, distinguished members of these orders from parish priests and led to competition between the two because of the perceived ability of the former to influence bequests made in sickness and on the deathbed.91 The inclusion of confident assertions regarding the impact of the brothel on domestic life indicates that the friars of San Francesco had a close relationship with their neighbours, which was similar in character to those studied by Bruzelius. The friars claimed that one of the most harmful effects of the brothel on the neighbourhood would result from the difficulty of enclosing the site. The

168  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw supplication referred to the ease with which the walls might be breached by individuals. The consequences would be moral—causing what was described as ‘universal dishonour’—and also economic because of the difficulty in collecting the gabella. It is clear that the authors were well aware of the role assigned to public brothel, as already described in the previous section. Criticisms that the site was neither suited to confining prostitution nor facilitating the collection of the gabella certainly questioned important elements of the government’s agenda. Furthermore, the friars warned, the homes and holdings of a large part of the city were at risk of being ‘dominated’ (signoreggiate) by this structure; this term, presumably, was intended to convey a sense of being overshadowed by an insalubrious presence, given the elevated position of the Castelletto site within the city. The petition ended by noting that the brothel would also cause ‘a thousand other inconveniences’ and imploring the Republic to move it elsewhere, to a location which would be less insulting to God and less dishonourable to the city (con minor dishonor di Dio et danno della cità tuta). According to the friars, the area around the Castelletto was a desirable place in which to live. The hill was known as montesano, a name which emphasized the mild climate and exposure to sunlight. They alleged that the relocation of the brothel would transform this agreeable spot into a forest of gloom (selva oscura); such language allowed the imagery of light and dark to sharpen the contrast between the sacred space occupied by the religious orders and the intended abode of prostitutes. Indeed, the whole area would soon be transformed into a den of treachery and fraud (tradimenti and habitation mariolesca). The concern of the friars was not only that the pimps, prostitutes, and other shady characters would frequent the neighbourhood but also the churches. In an arresting image, which added the metaphors of cleanliness and dirt to the friars’ linguistic palette, they protested that the holy and blessed churches would degenerate into latrines and sinks of foul vices (et cosi di chiese spirituali et sante saranno cloache et sentine d’ogni piu vicio nefando). The imagery of gutters and the cloache in the context of prostitution is far from unique to Genoa. St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) used it to encapsulate St Augustine’s view of the trade.92 In 1585 Fray Francisco Farfan reiterated such long-established assumptions vividly: The brothel in the city then, is like the stable or latrine in the house. Because just as the city keeps itself clean by providing a separate place where filth and dung are gathered, so neither less nor more, acts the brothel; where the filth and ugliness of the flesh are gathered like the garbage and dung of the city. In other words, prostitutes were regarded as a functional and necessary repository of filth, as were other medieval and early modern trades.93 In their petition, the friars turned this relatively common metaphor on its head by suggesting that the bastions of spirituality—the churches and

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  169 monasteries—would themselves be transformed into sewers. A similar image was deployed in medieval Bologna, as illustrated in the work of Angela Montford. She has suggested that friars may have been responsible for presenting complaints to the secular authorities regarding the health of their districts, particularly in relation to the choice of sites for depositing dung and rubbish. She also notes that: the dignity of the friars was also impugned by the presence of prostitutes and their clients loitering in the proximity of the church and convent and measures were taken to stop them. The links of purity, cleanliness, godliness and physical and moral health were made plain.94 It is interesting to note that the Genoese friars also adopted a pragmatic tone by noting the potential effects of the relocation of the brothel on the city’s infrastructure: the water supply would become muddy and unclean (turbide et immonde). This objection may seem far-fetched to modern readers but sixteenth-century Italians would have been all too familiar with the dirt and disruption caused by such extensive urban building works and public schemes. This area of the city also appears to have accommodated a number of trades, including dyeing and bathhouse keeping, which required considerable quantities of clean water. The friars would have been keenly aware of this fact; in 1532, for example, the silk dyers had been granted permission to erect a new chapel in San Francesco di Castelletto.95 In addition to reflecting the practical requirements of the local community, this reference to the endangered water supply may have been symbolic. The mendicant orders had traditionally been associated with the provision of clean water and the maintenance of the necessary infrastructure, not least as one of the six charitable works outlined in Matthew’s gospel, which instructed good Christians to give drink to the thirsty. Pure water was also replete with religious overtones. A sixteenth-century Venetian holy water basin now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, bears the inscription ‘Aqua Salvtis Aeternae’ (Water of Eternal Health). Researchers have uncovered a similar basin in the Bode Museum, Berlin, the base of which is inscribed ‘Aqua expiationis quotidianae’ (Water of daily purification).96 The friars were keen throughout their petition to emphasize the potential impact of the brothel on the urban fabric, as well as on the spiritual life of Genoa and its residents. Despite the friars’ trenchant language, there is no doubt that the actual relationship between prostitutes and the religious orders was more ambiguous and complex. Mary Laven has illustrated the intersection of the sacred and profane in relation to prostitutes who worshipped within the churches of Venetian convents.97 She explores the broader implications of her material: that both prostitutes and members of the religious orders were placed by their contemporaries on a ‘spectrum of human sinfulness’. Both groups, through their actions, ‘helped to maintain the virtue of the city as a whole’ and their function depended upon the utilization of space.98 Indeed, like

170  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw prostitutes, mendicants were subject to restrictions on movement; the Franciscan Constitutions of 1331, for example, forbade friars from going into town more than once a week.99 In addition, there were specific contexts within which it seemed desirable for there to be contact between the religious orders and prostitutes. During the Renaissance and Catholic Reformation a conviction that sinners should be the focus of assistance in the hope of leading them to salvation justified this type of mission. Valeria Polonio has noted that there were two traditional centres for the reception of former prostitutes in Genoa, located beyond the walls to the east and west.100 Within the city itself, the group most closely associated with ministering to prostitutes was lay rather than ecclesiastical. In 1472, the Padri were instructed to provide material support to the Dame delle Misericordia who were said to assist those who had given up their life of prostitution—the ‘meretrici convertite’.101 The Dame delle Misericordia were noble women, often described as being the ultimate example of lay piety in medieval Genoa and made famous by the work of St Caterina Fieschi Adorno (1447–1510), who became one of their number soon after her conversion. They reputedly walked the streets of the city in order to seek out the poor and, where possible, minister to them in their homes; they did not, therefore, provide care within a centralized institution. Their work, therefore, depended on the visibility and presence in urban space which was denied to prostitutes. Nevertheless, easy access to such sinful women remained crucial if the work of salvation was to be carried out effectively. Notwithstanding the stark imagery deployed by the friars, therefore, there were important connections between sanctity and profanity, as there were between cleanliness and filth and light and darkness. Each had its place, and they together constitute one of the many reasons why the widely adapted image of the body was used to represent cities and societies. The friars’ complaint was not that a brothel existed within the city, but that it should be located in a district which they sought to portray as a bastion of spirituality. It is worth noting that the distance between the old and new sites of the brothel was not dramatic. This provides a valuable insight into the way the area was then perceived. In addition, however, the timing of the relocation of the brothel may have been significant. In 1537, the friars had returned to San Francesco di Castelletto, having undertaken a number of repairs to the building as a result of damage by warfare. Improvements continued through the 1550s and 1560s and would intensify during the 1570s and 1580s, coming to include the famous Grimaldi Chapel of Giambologna (1529–1608).102 This was a period, therefore, in which the church and its convent were becoming more prominent and elaborate. Attitudes towards prostitution had also changed during the early decades of the sixteenth century, largely because of the spread of the ‘French Disease’ in the Italian peninsula.103 The initial institutional response to this new disease is often associated with Genoa, since the city was the site of the first Oratory of Divine Love, established by Ettore Vernazza (d.1524) at the turn of the

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  171 sixteenth century. In the context of changing assumptions about their own neighbourhood, as well as about the prostitutes who were going to join it, the friars employed powerful imagery to construct an influential critique of the proposed relocation. Nevertheless, it proved to be of no avail. The case for supporting the strada nuova and the city’s cathedral outweighed that for protecting Castelletto and San Francesco, despite the social, strategic, and spatial significance of the latter. The decision to retain the brothel in central Genoa and develop the strada nuova altered many aspects of two districts. It changed communication links by improving access to the streets. The Republic reopened the previously inoperative city gate of Portello for the use of those carrying out building works on the strada nuova, charging them because of the need to employ an officer of the Padri to open and close the gate in the morning and evening.104 Perceptions of the areas involved also changed. Just as Renaissance Italians believed that ‘shame literally clings to a person’, it could also linger in spaces, and the attempt to transform perceptions of the former site of the brothel took a number of forms.105 There was a notable shift in the language used in surviving proclamations and decrees. In the earliest texts, the intended space for the strada nuova is referred to explicitly as the site of the brothel. By 1551, particularly in documents referring to the sale of particular plots of land, it is described as lying close to the church of San Francesco.106 At a time when urban locations were defined in relation to the infrastructure which surrounded them, it is unsurprising that, after 1551, the buildings chosen to identify the whereabouts of the new, magnificent Renaissance thoroughfare were the nearby bastions of spirituality rather than that of sex. Little evidence of the earlier history of this strada nuova remains—it is only really apparent from the name of the fountain Marosa (‘Amarosa’).107 The authorities, however, did not have much more success in confining prostitution within the new brothel than they had in the old. In 1554, for example, prostitutes were instructed to leave the vico della stella and in 1557 similar orders were given to women in vico di mezza galea.108 The former site lay near the new strada nuova. Traditional problems would have been viewed in a new light: the women who had previously congregated close to, but not within, the brothel now threatened to encroach upon noble palaces and sites of civic magnificence. The history of the Genoese brothel emphasizes the mutability of attitudes towards the use of space and the ways in which private and public interests could intersect in attempts to alter the nature of particular areas; characterizations of specific places did not simply develop from without, but could be shaped by inhabitants through their articulation of the language of sacred and profane space.

IV  Defining Cleanliness The connections which the friars of San Francesco di Castelletto drew between the social, religious, and environmental impacts of prostitution are

172  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw not easily unravelled. In exploring the broad definition of cleanliness which the friars adopted, an obvious point of reference is the widely influential work of anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921–2007) on systems for classifying purity and danger, which has shaped many cultural, medical, and urban studies of the early modern period. One of the aspects of her research which has proved so enticing is the methodology she offers for aligning human universals and cultural phenomena.109 It is possible, however, to overplay the role of culture in defining systems of purity and danger. The body, as well as the medical literature which constructed a framework for understanding how that body functioned, shaped a way of perceiving the world. The people of early modern Europe regarded many of the substances which are perceived as polluting and dangerous today in similar terms: blood, excrement, malodorous matter. Other ideas at the heart of concepts of health, however, were different and included the crucial connection then made between man as a microcosm and the environment as a macrocosm. The series of correspondences connecting man and the natural world (between the humours of the body and elements of the environment and between human temperaments and seasons) provided a framework within which concepts could share similar characteristics, and exist within influential causal relationships, whilst being discernible and discrete entities. Ideas about healthy bodies and environments, then, are an essential starting point for understanding how particular societies defined and attempted to contain pollution. The significant literature that exists on early modern public health has illustrated the demonstrable impact of sanitary measures upon urban development, particularly in encouraging the zoning of dangerous trades and the attempt to improve the sights, sounds, and smells of civic space, although such work has only infrequently incorporated areas beyond city walls into its discussion.110 Douglas Biow’s 2006 monograph on The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy established the place of dirt and cleanliness in a cross-section of Italian literature and interpreted notions of both in a broad manner.111 This type of study has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of public health, which has often prioritized the visible traces of dirt over the symbolic. Research into the language and imagery of religion in relation to cleanliness are more limited.112 This is despite the fact that Mary Douglas’s original text dedicated chapters to religious prohibitions. Studies of public health in this period have recognized the central role played by the Church and religious orders in the provision of healthcare, but the way in which ideas about health may have reinforced ideas about spirituality have been less well considered. Rarer still are explorations of the relationship between Renaissance and Catholic Reformation spirituality and the environment.113 In other words, whilst historians have investigated a wide range of ideas to produce a comprehensive account of attitudes to physical well-being, contemporary understandings of medicine and the environment have less frequently been incorporated into assessments of religious, social, or urban change.

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  173 Yet, as is clear from the example of the friars of San Francesco di Castelletto in Genoa, cleanliness could have important religious implications. The growing significance of the materiality of late medieval and Renaissance religion has been attested by a number of scholars.114 The environment often featured in miracle narratives or hagiographical tales, as sometimes did cleaning.115 Fabrizio Nevola’s work on fifteenth-century Siena describes a process by which ‘devotional images and dedications to the Virgin Mary were instrumental to the urban improvement of semiderelict or marginal sites’. Two sites, one within and one without the city walls, were cleared of shrubbery and cleansed of the stench of urine, which had created a ‘squalid’ area. Nevola notes that ‘the justification for the construction of both shrines was in part motivated by the desire to restore the sites to a condition fitting to be honoured by the Virgin Mary’s gaze’.116 The antithesis between filth and holiness is also clear in the story of Antonio Rinaldeschi, who, in 1501 lost at gambling, cursed the name of the Virgin and threw some dry horse dung at her image in Florence. He was hanged, it was said, before there was time for him to be publicly lynched. In a visual representation of the scene he is shown with the devil at his head.117 In Machiavelli’s Mandragola, Fra’ Timoteo bemoans the fact that the friars have failed to keep an image of the Virgin Mary ‘well cleaned’ and attributes the decline in attendance at the shrine to their negligence.118 As these few examples have suggested, in the context of Italian Renaissance piety, the connections between meanings of cleanliness are clear but have, as yet, to be the focus of systematic study. Such research could reveal more about Renaissance and Catholic Reformation piety, such as the significance of changing preparations for urban rituals, and society in general. In short, we know a great deal about individual parts of the social, religious, and physical landscape of the Italian peninsula during the fifteenth and sixteenth century but lack a strong sense of the unifying relationships or correspondences between these parts.119 Understanding these connections more fully would enable us better to appreciate the perceived impact of a brothel on the landscape and salubriousness of the neighbourhood around Genoa’s Franciscan friary, as well as its social make-up, and bring into even sharper focus the perceived problem caused by prostitutes and their place within this Renaissance city.

Notes * I am grateful to Carole Rawcliffe and Andrew Spicer for their invaluable comments on this chapter. The funding for this research was provided by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellowship. 1 Archivio Storico del Comune di Genova [ASCG], Padri del Comune [PdC], 2–73 (4 September 1566). 2 The process of putting down foundations for the strada nuova lasted through the 1550s because building works were suspended between 1552 and 1558 during the Genoese war with Corsica. Public auctions of land were held in 1551,

174  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw 1558–59 and 1561–62. The best-known dissemination of the plans of the palaces may be found in Peter Paul Rubens, Palazzi di Genova (Genoa, 1622). Definitions of the Renaissance are notoriously diffuse, but a study which concerns the 1550s and 1560s requires a justification of the term. It is being used here to refer to a period and a series of ideas. Peter Burke has examined the late Renaissance in Genoa during the 1550s and 1560s, which was made manifest in the architectural development of the strada nuova and some limited flourishing of civic humanist ideas, in his ‘Public and Private Spheres in Late Renaissance Genoa’ in his Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 111–23. 3 George L. Gorse, ‘A Classical Stage for the Old Nobility: The strada nuova and Sixteenth-Century Genoa’, The Art Bulletin 79 (1997), 301. 4 The focus upon social, religious, and physical (including urban and environmental) ideas in this chapter is not intended to suggest that similar points could not be fruitfully explored in relation to culture, politics, and the economy. Indeed, the broad application of the language and imagery of health across these spheres has been widely recognized, although political and economic themes have undoubtedly been neglected in recent scholarship. For valuable work on the impact of the concept of the marketplace on expressions of spirituality and salvation, for example, see the studies by Todeschini. Caroline Bruzelius refers to the imagery of Christ as a good merchant in Preaching, Building and Burying: Friars in the Medieval City (New Haven and London, 2014), p. 127. 5 On the function of prostitution and the space of the brothel see, in particular, Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500–1800 (London, 1995), pp. 300–2 and the bibliographical essay pp.  603–7. For brothels in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy see Romano Canosa and Isabella Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione in Italia dal Quattrocento alla fine del Settecento (Rome, 1989), pp. 9–13. 6 In the important Ligurian port of Savona, for example, the prostitutes were located beyond the city walls. I. Scovazzi and F. Noberasco, Storia di Savona, 3 vols (Savona, 1926), III, p. 332. 7 Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution in Renaissance Ferrara’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60 (2001), 402. 8 The nineteenth-century doctor Romolo Granara used archival sources to consider the history of the trade within the city, with the purpose of making medical-social comparisons for his contemporaries. See his Di alcune metamorfosi della sifilide: nozioni storiche sulla prostituzione in Genova (Genoa, 1863). An engaging essay by Valeria Polonio also considers the assistance offered to prostitutes within the city in the course of a more general survey of welfare and charitable structures there. See her ‘Ubi karitas, ibi pax: l’aiuto al più debole, Secoli IX–XVII’ in Dino Puncuh (ed.), Storia della cultura ligure (Genoa, 2004), pp. 311–68. See also the discussion of female prostitution within the chapter entitled ‘Il ‘vizio nefando’ a Genova’ in Canosa and Colonnello (eds), Storia della prostituzione, pp. 165–75. 9 Ennio Poleggi, Strada nuova: una lottizzazione del ’500 a Genova (Genoa, 1968); Gorse, ‘A Classical Stage for the Old Nobility’. 10 Ennio Poleggi’s work, however, includes a rich appendix of archival evidence relating to the development of the strada nuova, a number of which refer to the brothel and which have been used in this chapter. 11 Ghirardo. ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 405. 12 It was founded as the ‘Salvatores portus et moduli’ during the thirteenth century. On the Padri del Comune see Raffaela Ponte, ‘Orografia, drografia e clima a Genova in età moderna. Nei documenti uno strumeto per lo studio e la tutela dell’ambiente’ in Les sources d’archives pour l’étude du climat et de l‘environne­ ment (Paris, 2013), pp. 146–57.

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  175 13 The Padri has attracted attention from local historians, who have used the rich, surviving archive to great effect, notably in studies which have reconstructed much of the development of the urban fabric during the medieval and early modern periods. See, in particular, the works of Francesco Podestà (1831– 1912), Ennio Poleggi, and Paola Massa Piergiovanni. The current director of the Archivio Storico in Genoa, Dr Raffaela Ponte, has also produced illuminating work on the Padri and its surviving archive. 14 Roberta Mucciarelli, ‘Igiene, salute e pubblica decoro nel Medioevo’ in Mucciarelli, Vigni and Fabbri (eds), Vergognosa immunditia: igiene pubblica e privata a Siena dal medioevo all’età contemporanea (Siena, 2000), p. 66. 15 The financial significance of prostitution in Genoa was far from unique; elsewhere in Liguria, in Savona, the city’s prostitutes were also subject to the gabella, which was nicknamed the rubaldario. Scovazzi and Noberasco, Storia di Savona, III, p. 332. 16 During the fifteenth century, income was received from fines, the public aqueduct and gabelle (duties). These duties were exacted on bequests (deceni legatorum), the brothel (Montis Albani) and lime (pondus calcine), as well as revenue from the port (Rivauli seu Schiffati, Sartie, Devetum seu licentia piscandi in portu). These public works included the Molo vecchio, with the Porta Siberia by Galeazzo Alessi, the Molo nuovo, the Loggia della Mercanzia, the Portofranco and building campaigns in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. 17 Cornelio Desimoni, Statuto del Padri del Comune della Repubblica Genovese (Genoa, 1886), p. 34. 18 In some cases, the women were offered a choice of a fine or physical punishment, as in the case of blasphemy. Ibid., p. 27. 19 P. Massa Piergiovanni ‘Cenni sulle rendite extraportuali della Magistratura, indispensabili per due secoli al finanziamento dello scalo’ in Giorgio Doria and Paola Massa Piergiovanni (eds), Il sistema portuale della repubblica di Genova: profili organizzativi e politica gestionale (secc. XII–XVIII) (Genoa, 1988), p. 130. 20 Vito Piergiovanni, ‘Dottrina e prassi nella formazione del diritto portuale: il modello Genovese’ in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), I porti come impresa economica (Prato, 1988) pp. 162–63. 21 ASCG, PdC, 22–42 (9 July 1554). 22 Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 413 describes three. 23 Poleggi, Strada nuova, p. 32. 24 In Ferrara, one of the city’s three brothels formed part of the Montealbano tavern, located west of the castle near the old city walls. Ghirardo. ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 413. 25 Steven Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese 958–1528 (London, 1996), pp. 261–2. 26 Anecdotally the fountain is said to have taken its name from its proximity to the prostitutes, because the brothel was situated in the contrada, earning it the nickname Fonte Amoroso. 27 Poleggi, Strada nuova, p. 31. 28 Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 418. 29 ASCG, PdC, 1–18 (12 March 1459). In Venice too prostitutes were only allowed to leave the island of Rialto on a Saturday morning. The same concession was granted to prostitutes in Milan and Ferrara. 30 Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 404. 31 extra portellum propinqui domui disciplinator’ sancti francis’ et hospicium elephantis in ASCG, PdC, 3–55 (5 January 1471). On the confraternity of San Francesco see Domenico Cambiaso, ‘Casacce e confraternite medievali in Genova e Liguria’, Atti della società ligure di storia patria 71 (1948), 81–133. 32 ASCG, PdC, 6–128 (4 June 1496).

176  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw 3 ASCG, PdC, 16–48 (15 July 1540). 3 34 Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy’ in John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge, 2003), p. 92. Catherine Koresi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2002). 35 Desimoni, Statuto del Padri del Comune, p. 32. 36 Ibid., p. 29. The bell was to be rung ad primum sonum. 37 Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, p. 261. 38 The conduct of prostitutes, and the punishments which were exacted for particular crimes, were largely defined by the brothel’s statutes. In the case of violent behaviour which caused physical harm, however, the women were to be handed over to the official administrator to be tried according to the city’s statutes. Punishments varied as to whether they were to be inflicted within the brothel (such as beating for blasphemy) or as a public spectacle in the city (such as beating for frequenting the streets on any day other than Saturday). Desimoni, Statuto del Padri del Comune, p. 27. 39 Ibid., p. 33. 40 Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, p. 283. 41 Desimoni, Statuto del Padri del Comune, p. 34. 42 Leges Genuenses: Historiae Patriae Monumenta, vol. 18 (Turin, 1901), col. 922. 43 Hufton, The Prospect Before Her, p. 301. 44 Granara, Di alcune metamorfosi della sifilide, p. 89. 45 Ibid., p. 90. 46 Ghirardo. ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 408. 47 Kevin Mummey and Kathryn Reyerson ‘Whose City Is This? Hucksters, Domestic Servants, Wet-Nurses, Prostitutes and Slaves in Late Medieval Western Mediterranean Urban Society’, History Compass 9 (2011), 915. 48 ASCG, PdC, 1–18 (12 March 1459). 49 ASCG, PdC, 3–55 (5 January 1471). 50 ASCG, PdC, 1–18 (12 March 1459). 51 ASCG, PdC, 3–55 (5 January 1471) and 3–81 (6 April 1472). 52 ASCG, PdC, 22–42 (9 July 1554). 53 Mummey and Reyerson, ‘Whose City Is This?’, p. 916. 54 Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, p. 268. 55 Ibid., p. 283. 56 ASCG, PdC, 3–81 (6 April 1471). 57 ASCG, PdC, 1–18 (12 March 1459). 58 ASCG, PdC, 1–18 (12 March 1459). 59 Desimoni, Statuto del Padri del Comune, pp. 28, 29. In 1460, a law passed by the Venetian College commanding prostitutes to live in what was described as a ‘fortified brothel’, guarded for the women’s safety. 60 In Ferrara, in 1476, a proclamation decreed that ‘who allows first this one then that one to know her carnally, or who is known by public reputation as a shameful woman of dishonourable life’ would be considered a prostitute. ‘Space, time and money’ in contrast, were the key defining points for pimps: ‘if a man slept in the room of a prostitute more than twice in one week, if he lived or talked with her for at least an hour more than three times a week, or if he lived off her earnings’. Diane Ghirardo also highlights the concept of the ‘meretrice casalenga’ (prostitute housewives) in Ferrara: ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 407. In Amsterdam, the term ‘whore’ could refer to those who engaged in sexual acts outside the marriage bed; money did not always change hands. Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford, 2011), pp. 4–5. 61 Desimoni, Statuto del Padri del Comune, p. 27. For the use of this term elsewhere, see David C. Mengel, ‘From Venice to Jerusalem and Beyond: Milíč of

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  177 Kromĕříž and the Topography of Prostitution in Fourteenth-Century Prague’, Speculum 79 (2004), 417. 62 Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 410. 63 Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, pp. 108–9. 64 Honour can be summarized ‘as a good that can be acquired or negotiated . . . as a code or semiotic system for whose dissemination symbols, gestures and so on serve as media; and, finally, . . . as social capital’, according to Van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore, p. 80. 65 I am grateful to Professor Carole Rawcliffe for drawing to my attention that almshouse regulations were often read every quarter in England. 66 ASCG, PdC, 22–42 (9 July 1554). 67 ASCG, PdC, 5–5 (15 January 1481) and 5–35 (21 June 1482). 68 Gorse, ‘A Classical Stage for the Old Nobility’, 309. 69 Poleggi, Strada nuova, p. 47. 70 See C. Bruzzo, ‘Capitolato, contratti e ordinamento dei lavori per la costruzione delle nuove mura di Genova nel 1630–32’, Atti della società ligure di storia patria 64 (1935), 1–65. 71 In order to make way for a new street in Renaissance Ferrara in 1498 one of the city’s three brothels was torn down and the women allegedly thrown out. It was not until 1501 that the brothel was replaced. Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’, 415. 72 Poleggi, Strada nuova, p. 45. 73 Gorse, ‘A Classical Stage for the Old Nobility’, 309. 74 ASCG, PdC, 286–82 (22 May 1558) reprinted in Poleggi, Strada nuova, pp. 415–16. 75 As Christine Shaw has written, ‘The republic of Genoa was renowned for its political instability, and its reputation was justified. Between 1300 and 1528, when the constitution was radically reformed under the aegis of the great Genoese naval commander, Andrea Doria, it has been calculated that there were seventy-two rebellions and changes of regime’. On the political machinations of this period see Christine Shaw, ‘Genoa’ in Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini (eds), The Italian Renaissance State (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 220–36. 76 Poleggi, Strada nuova, p. 39 n. 23. For a very helpful description of the impact of warfare on the church of San Francesco di Castelletto during the fifteenth and sixteenth century, see Giorgio Rossini, ‘San Francesco di Castelletto: dagli inizi alle demolizioni ottocentesche’ in Max Seidel (ed.), Giovanni Pisano a Genova (Genoa, 1987), pp. 236–37. 77 For the term used in Milan see Canosa and Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione, p. 18. The place where prostitutes were supposed to live in Venice was termed a castelletto (little castle) because it was only accessible across one bridge and could therefore, in theory at least, be closely monitored. For a discussion of the image of the castle in these contexts, see Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw, Plague Hospitals: Public Health for the City in Early Modern Venice (Farnham, 2012), pp. 54–61. 78 ‘preterea reperissee locum remotum et situm in arce Casteleti multum idoneum ad construendum lupanar, parva impensa citra occupationem situum de quibus se valet Reipublica, qui locus habet omnes commoditates aeris, solis et acque et quo homines per multas vias se conferre poterunt’ cited in Poleggi, Strada nuova, p. 405. 79 I am grateful to Rosa Salzberg and Massimo Rospocher for help regarding the precise meaning of this term and the system through which inns like this were run under licence. 80 For a comparative analysis of the decision concerning the location of the brothel in Cremona, see Canosa and Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione, p. 132.

178  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw 81 Ibid., p. 404. 82 ASCG, PdC, 286–75 (9 May 1558) cited in Poleggi, Strada nuova, p. 415. 83 ‘cessurum nedum ad publicum civitatis ornamentum verum etiam ad multam utilitatem et maxime pro suffraganda fabrica ecclesie sancti Laurentii’ in ASG, sala B. Senarega, Atti del Senato f. 1273 (13 March 1551) reprinted in Poleggi, Strada nuova, p. 407. 84 ASG, sala B. Senarega, Atti del Senato f. 1270 s.d. reprinted in Ibid., p. 407. 85 ‘Suplichiamo V S Ill non per conseglio ma per ricordo che non le fia sdegno haver sopra di cio novo discorso’ in Ibid., p. 407. 86 Rossini, ‘San Francesco di Castelletto’, p. 229. 87 Bruzelius, Preaching, Building and Burying, p. 16 notes that the land given by Giovanni Badoer to the Franciscans at what is now the Frari church was swampy and low. Her work effectively sets convents within their spatial context without elaborating upon the social make-up of such areas. I am grateful to Professor Carole Rawcliffe for pointing out to me that English friaries are also suburban or peripheral. 88 Fragments of a number of these monuments survive in the city’s Museo di Sant’Agostino, which houses Liguria’s principal sculpture collection. 89 Valuable information on the chapels is given in Rossini, ‘San Francesco di Castelletto’, pp. 229–61; Vincenzo Promis (ed.), ‘Libro degli anniversarii del convent di San Francesco di Castelletto in Genova’, Atti della società di storia patria 10 (1874), 387–431. 90 The text is provided in full as an appendix in Ibid., pp. 406–7. 91 Bruzelius, Preaching, Building and Burying. 92 ‘Unde Augustinus dicit, quod hoc fecit meretrix in mundo quod sentina in mari vel cloaca in palatial: ‘Tolle cloacam et replebis foetore palatium’ cited in Canosa and Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione, p. 177. 93 See the work of Carole Rawcliffe, including Urban Bodies: Communal Health in late Medieval English Towns and Cities and ‘A Marginal Occupation? The Medieval Laundress and Her Work’, Gender and History 21 (2009), 147–69. For early modern trades see Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge. 2006); Katherine Rinne, ‘The Landscape of Laundry in late Cinquecento Rome’, Studies in the Decorative Arts 9 (2001–2), 34–60. 94 Angela Montford, Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot, 2004). 95 Rossini, ‘San Francesco di Castelletto’, p. 237. 96 http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O122366/holy-water-basin-holy-waterbasin-unknown, accessed 6 October 2014. See also Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies chapter four ‘Water’, pp. 176–229 on the religious and theological aspects of water supply. 97 Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance convent (London, 2003), Chapter 4 ‘Sacred and Profane’, particularly pp. 67–72. 98 Ibid., p. 68. 99 Bruzelius, Preaching, Building and Burying, p. 48. 100 Polonio, ‘Ubi karitas, ibi pax: l’aiuto al piu debole, Secoli IX–XVII’, pp. 318– 19. Sant’Agata was an important religious institution on the principal road leading east from the city, as well as being the site of a bridge over the Bisagno. This area was notable for providing welfare and assistance in the form of the Crociferi and San Fruttuoso di Terralba hospitals, as well being home to the religious orders. The site to the west of the city lay at SS Benedetto e Maria di Fassolo, close to the leper hospital of San Lazzaro. 101 ASCG, PdC, 3–82 (7 April 1472). As yet, the specific nature of the work of the Dame with prostitutes is unclear. For interesting reflections on the work of

Cleaning up the Renaissance City  179 laundresses and their association with prostitution, as well as views regarding the suitability of the trade for reformed prostitutes, see Rawcliffe, ‘A Marginal Occupation?’, pp. 150, 158. 102 This chapel is the focus for Mary Weitzel Gibbons, Giambologna: Narrator of the Catholic Reformation (Berkeley CA, 1995). For these developments more generally, see Giorgio Rossini, ‘San Francesco di Castelletto’, pp. 240–1. 103 See Canosa and Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione, pp. 113–23 (‘Cura delle anime e cura dei corpi’). On the responses, see Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven and London, 1997). 104 ASG, sala B Senarega, Atti del Senato f. 1277 doc 382 reprinted in Poleggi, Strada nuova, pp. 419–20. 105 Ibid., pp. 46–7. 106 See ASCG, PdC, 286–14 (22 January 1551) and ASG, sala B Senarega, Atti del Senato, f. 1273, doc 145 reprinted in Ibid., pp. 404–5. 107 See note 27. 108 See ASCG, PdC, 22–49 (6 August 1554) and 23–26 (11 May 1557). 109 For a stimulating discussion of Douglas’s ideas and their impact on the historiography of a number of periods see Mark Bradley, ‘Approaches to Pollution and Propriety’ in Mark Bradley (ed.), Rome, Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal city from Antiquity to Modernity (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 11–40. 110 Key works for Italy include Roberta Mucciarelli, ‘Igiene, salute e pubblica decoro nel Medioevo’; John Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (New Haven and London, 2006); Laura McGough, Gender, Sexuality and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice: The Disease That Came to Stay (London, 2011); Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2010) and Gauvin Bailey, Pamela Jones, Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester (eds), Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a time of Plague 1500–1800 (Chicago IL, 2005). 111 Douglas Biow, The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Ithaca NY, 2006) explores the cleanliness of domestic and urban environments, clothing and bodies, as well as definitions of clean ‘behaviour’. His focus is less on the practical measures undertaken and more on the way in which cleanliness became a topos in the literature of the period. 112 There is valuable work for the medieval period. Ellen Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes (Philadelphia, 2012) and Carole Rawcliffe, ‘A Marginal Occupation?’, particularly p. 153. 113 Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘The Nun Apothecaries of Renaissance Florence: Marketing Medicines in the Convent’, Renaissance Studies 25 (2011), 627–47, her guest-edited special issue of Renaissance Studies 28:4 (2014) on ‘Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe’ and her forthcoming monograph on Cultures of Care: Women, Health and Healing in late Renaissance Italy. Katherine Rinne has produced a valuable study of the significance of the infrastructure of water in Rome to the Catholic Reformation Papacy in The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains and the birth of the Baroque city (New Haven and London, 2011). As yet, Alexandra Walsham’s exploration of the influential relationship between the Reformation and the landscape in Britain has not been matched for the Catholic Reformation. Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011). 114 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: an Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011) considers the period between 1150 and 1550.

180  Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw 115 For an outstanding study of Ligurian miracle stories see Gervase Rosser and Jane Garnett, Spectacular Miracles: Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 2013). An example of cleaning featuring prominently in a miracle narrative can be found in the story of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato. See Robert Maniura, ‘Persuading the Absent Saint: Image and Performance in Marian Devotion’ in Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner (eds), Saints: Faith Without Borders (Chicago IL, 2011), p. 256. Molly Morrison has explored the associations between holiness and filth in hagiographic accounts of female saints eating filth or licking wounds: ‘Strange Miracles: A Study of the Peculiar Healings of St Maria Maddelena de’Pazzi’, Logos 8 (2005), 129–44. Such behaviour featured prominently in the story of St Catherine of Genoa. Ellen Arnold has documented the role that the environment played in miracle stories of the medieval Ardennes in, ‘Engineering Miracles: Water Control, Conversion and the Creation of a Religious Landscape in the Medieval Ardennes’, Environment and History 13 (2007), 477–502. 116 Fabrizio Nevola, ‘ “Surveillance and Control of the Street in Renaissance Italy”, in “Experiences of the Street in Early Modern Italy” ’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16 (2013), 98. 117 William J. Connell and Giles Constable, ‘Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 61 (1998), 53–92. 118 Niccolo Machiavelli, Mandragola Act five, Scene one, cited in Rosser and Garnett, Spectacular Miracles p. 109. 119 These connections will be the focus of my forthcoming monograph, Cleaning Up Renaissance Italy.

10 Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault Compromised Chastity, Marginalized Lives? Sarah Toulalan In relation to sexual crime, ‘marginal’ status is usually discussed with regard to perpetrators, those prosecuted and convicted who may be categorized as rapists, exhibitionists, sexual sadists, child molesters, and paedophiles. The victims of such crimes are not often considered in this respect, except in so far as a personal history as a victim of sexual abuse is perceived to be a contributory factor in shaping adult abusers, or where, in some cultures, a raped woman may be regarded as an outcast in her community, no longer marriageable because no longer virginal.1 It is even less usual to consider the child victims of rape in this context, particularly when a child is both below the age of consent—thus regarded as morally innocent because understood to be lacking sufficient understanding to be able to give consent to sexual intercourse—and also prepubescent—thus also sexually innocent because lacking a sexually developed body or sexual knowledge. In this chapter I will investigate this largely ignored question of to what extent the prior chastity and morality of child victims of rape or sexual assault featured in the trials prosecuted on their behalf in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and thus to what extent a girl’s reputation—and hence her future prospects—may have been blighted by her appearance in court, marginalizing her from the society of ‘honest’ women in her community.2 Furthermore, in many cases part of the prosecution evidence brought to the attention of the court—and thus of those attending as spectators—included the accusation that the alleged perpetrator had infected the child with venereal disease. Such an infection was regarded as further damage to the child as it not only blighted her both her immediate and future health, but was also likely to have a deleterious impact upon her future prospects.3 The effects of such infection on both the body and reputation were thus also likely to marginalize the child in household and community. This discussion will include girls who were aged below the age of consent, and therefore whose consent and prior chastity should have been irrelevant to the prosecution, as well as those who were over it, up to the age of fourteen. The age of consent for the purpose of prosecuting rape in seventeenth and eighteenth century England did not align neatly with contemporary ideas about the boundaries of childhood, particularly as marked by

182  Sarah Toulalan sexual development at puberty. The second statute of Westminster of 1576 set the age of consent for prosecuting rape as a felony at ten, reducing it from the age of twelve which had previously corresponded with the age of consent to marriage for a girl. Sexual intercourse under the age of twelve with consent was now classed as a misdemeanour, but in practice this was largely ignored.4 For the purposes of this discussion I have taken fourteen as the upper boundary of childhood, although this was neither fixed nor consistent at this time. Age categories shifted according to different purposes or markers, whether these were biological markers such as puberty and the age of sexual maturity, or legal to do with sexual consent, competence to stand trial or to give evidence under oath in court. It was not expected that a female child would develop sexually until the age of twelve at the earliest, but, more usually, not until the age of fourteen or even older. Girls aged between ten and fourteen might therefore be expected to be prepubescent and hence lacking in sexual knowledge or awareness. In his History of the Pleas of the Crown, Sir Matthew Hale discussed the status of the child as a witness, setting out fourteen as the age at which competence would be expected, but that witnesses might be admitted when aged below fourteen depending on the type of trial, including specifically rape.5 This age fits with fourteen as the upper boundary of childhood, but the flexibility allowed in practice to admit children as witnesses when below this age also corresponds to the ‘grey area’ between ten and fourteen when a young girl was judged legally competent to consent to sexual intercourse but was unlikely to have undergone the sexual development of puberty and hence to be understood as either physically ready or ‘ripe’ for intercourse.6 The age of fourteen also coincides both with contemporary definitions of childhood as well as, rather more loosely, with the ages by which a child might formally enter paid employment.7 Hugh Cunningham and other historians of labour have shown that young people entered service or apprenticeship usually between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, although orphans or the children of paupers who were thrown upon the parish for support often did so at a considerably younger age.8 A number of the girls identified in these trial reports were working as servants or apprentices when aged as young as ten, and were sexually assaulted or raped while undertaking tasks associated with their employment, whether within the household, the place of work (often the same location), or when running errands in the neighbourhood. Young girls were at risk of sexual assault and rape within the spaces in which they lived and worked, and from the men with whom they came into contact in the daily course of their lives. These were not usually rapes by strangers, nor did they often occur in places that were unfamiliar or unknown to the child.9 When prosecutions involving children over the age of consent failed, especially because her absence of consent was doubtful, then the child’s sexual reputation was highly likely to have been compromised, potentially affecting her status and future life prospects, placing her on the margins of

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  183 her community.10 Such a potential public ‘naming and shaming’ may subsequently have been made much more widely known through the published reports of trials, including in the burgeoning news media of the eighteenth century.11 Although recent analyses of conceptions of female honour in the early modern period have pointed out that women’s honour was not only dependent on sexual reputation, but could also be related to—and dependent upon—other issues such as occupational identities, household economic and social credit, family unity, household order, and parental authority, nevertheless a woman’s honour and reputation, at all levels of society, was significantly shaped by perceptions of her sexual probity.12 As Linda Pollock has argued, reputation was ‘less derived from a person’s internal virtue than from society’s judgment of an individual’s worth’, and a woman’s worth was judged firstly through her sexual behaviour, both words and deeds.13 Prosecutions for rape and sexual assault fore-grounded a woman’s sexual reputation, placing her chastity and previous sexual behaviour at the heart of whether or not a court would believe that sex with the accused man had been against her will.14 The following discussion draws upon the published accounts of 306 trials for rape and sexual assault with intent to rape tried at the Old Bailey between 1674 and 1799, particularly those reporting trials where the prosecution was brought on behalf of girls aged fourteen and under. These constitute just over half of the total: 155 trials or 51 per cent. Of these, just under 59 per cent involved girls under ten, rising to just under 83 per cent to include girls aged under twelve. The predominance of prosecutions involving such young girls is most probably indicative of both the greater likelihood of achieving a conviction where absence of consent did not have to be proven and of contemporary attitudes towards the ruination or spoiling of girls, as discussed below. The reports of the trial proceedings were published following each of the eight sessions held every year and are referred to collectively as The Old Bailey Sessions Papers; they survive from 1674 although not in complete runs for each year.15 These published accounts are exceptional in providing a record—albeit incomplete—of what was said in this court.16 The accounts vary in length, with some trials reported in much more detail than others, and generally becoming much lengthier in the eighteenth century, especially when a trial was considered particularly controversial or provided salacious and titillating detail that would attract readers.17 As counsel for both the prosecution and the defence were increasingly used in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the reports expanded to include details elicited through their questioning of those bringing the prosecution, defendants, and witnesses.18 The statements and comments made in court by witnesses also indicate what others thought about the child, about her behaviour and character, and sometimes that of her family, and therefore suggest whether or not she may have left court with a reputation for chastity that was vindicated, or that had been publicly damaged. Despite Courtney Thomas’s assertion that ‘the selection of juries who did not know

184  Sarah Toulalan the accused made personal reputation less important’, in trials for rape or sexual assault the personal reputation of both victim and accused were still key issues heard by the court, and upon which a jury’s verdict could rest.19 For an accused man, his reputation included his prior sexual behaviour, but it was not the only issue in question.20 For a woman making an accusation of rape, though, her prior sexual behaviour and reputation as a chaste and modest woman was critical to whether or not her accusation of rape was believable. As Laura Gowing has argued in the context of defamation and the gendering of reputation, ‘the implications of men’s and women’s sexual behaviour are not only disparate, but hardly comparable’.21 The Sessions Papers do not, unfortunately, provide a complete or necessarily accurate account of what went on in court. Witnesses’ responses to questions may be run together as a continuous narrative, and much detail is omitted or quite obviously put into different words, particularly evidence to do with sexual details when there are words and phrases used in the reports that are highly unlikely to have been those used by a child (such as ‘carnal knowledge’).22 The narratives are filtered through those who wrote down the details when a complaint of rape or sexual assault was originally made and a suspect brought before a Justice, through the clerks who recorded words spoken in the courtroom, and the compilers of the published trial accounts. There are thus omissions, summaries of evidence and paraphrasing, including interpolation of formulaic phrases and legal language that witnesses would not themselves have used, especially when witnesses were female children overwhelmingly from the lower orders, so unlikely to have received much formal education or to be familiar with legal terms.23 The jurisdiction of the Old Bailey included the City of London and the county of Middlesex. It thus covered an extensive area including both urban and rural parts north of the Thames, stretching from parishes in the west bordering Westminster to those in the east and into the City of London, serving a highly diverse mix of environments and populations. However, those who appeared before the court as complainants, defendants or witnesses in trials for rape and sexual assault demonstrated little social diversity, mostly representing the artisanal, shopkeeping, labouring, and servant classes. Questions about reputation, attitudes towards sexual impropriety, and the impact of what was recorded as said in court thus apply mostly to this social ­sector. The published accounts have limitations but they nevertheless provide ­information and evidence that cannot be gleaned from the depositions taken down at the time of the original complaint before a Justice of the Peace.24 The questions to do with how a girl’s character and her sexual reputation were perceived, or whether or not a girl’s life was ruined by her having been raped or sexually assaulted are very difficult to answer with any certainty as there is very little direct evidence of either the collective attitudes of communities, nor of particular individuals within those communities, towards the girls who were involved in pursuing prosecutions for rape or sexual

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  185 assault, whether or not the trial concluded in conviction or acquittal of the accused. One of the very few contemporary accounts we have of a man who was apprehended and prosecuted for sexually assaulting children appears in the autobiography of Adam Martindale, but he says nothing about how the children were subsequently regarded, focusing almost entirely on his own young daughter’s role in bearing witness against this man.25 Esther Snell has argued that most victims of rape did not report the offence because of the ‘stigma attached to rape, with its attending social ramifications’ and that those cases that are represented in the Sessions Papers are therefore ‘atypical’.26 Little further evidence can be gleaned from newspaper reports as these were usually very brief and lacking in detail in order to avoid competition with the published Sessions Papers. Very occasionally a case that was particularly sensational was reported in much more detail, such as that of Francis Charteris for the rape of his servant Anne Bond in 1730, or the trial of schoolmaster Benjamin Russen on several counts of rape of girls attending his school in 1777. The conclusions drawn here are therefore based upon the reported statements and comments of those who gave evidence in court that are suggestive of more general attitudes about sexual chastity and morality, as well as of particular opinions about the character and reputation of the girl who has reported a sexual crime resulting in a prosecution. They are also founded upon contemporary knowledge and ideas about venereal disease and its treatment. If a prosecution was unsuccessful, as was probable given that rape was characterized as ‘an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved’, and many more defendants were acquitted than convicted, a girl’s sexual reputation and hence her future marriageability could be compromised. This was particularly the case if she was over the age of ten and a conviction was unsuccessful because consent was accepted as a defence (although, as Garthine Walker has shown, not all those acquitted were thought to be innocent).27 Randolph Trumbach has concluded that courts in the eighteenth century became less sympathetic to working-class women who alleged rape as ‘the presumption that a girl who behaved in a way appropriate to her future destiny as a mother was not likely to end up in a situation in which she would be raped’.28 James Sharpe has pointed out that contemporaries considered the shame of a guilty verdict as additional just punishment for the criminal—a kind of justified and legal defamation.29 These attitudes are likely also to have informed reactions to and attitudes towards those who brought a prosecution for rape or sexual assault but failed to secure a guilty verdict, as the court’s verdict indicated that it had not been convinced that the sex was not consensual if the girl was over the age of consent.30 Even if a prosecution for fornication was not then pursued against the girl who had made the accusation of rape, her reputation would nevertheless have been tarnished by the imputation of sexual immorality.31 It has been argued that the lower classes maintained lower standards of sexual morality through necessity as marriage became expensive in the second half of the eighteenth

186  Sarah Toulalan century, the disruption of relationships through migration and emigration, and that consequently ‘bigamy, common-law marriage and premarital sex were accepted as inevitable in plebeian culture’.32 However, historians have demonstrated that women from the lower classes—and men—were highly concerned about damage to their reputations by public insults and slanderous talk (as were the upper classes) and frequently sought redress through the courts.33 Faramerz Dabhoiwala has further pointed out that the loss of reputation could be potentially irredeemable and regarded as the first step ‘into a downward spiral of general moral depravity’.34 The evidence I will discuss here, from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, of how the families, friends, and neighbours of girls who claimed to have been raped or sexually assaulted reacted to their condition similarly does not suggest that the loss of chastity was taken lightly, nor that a young girl’s sexual behaviour was thought unremarkable. The word most frequently used by both parents and other adults who discovered that a girl had had sexual contact with someone to describe the consequences for the child, as well as by some girls themselves, was ‘ruined’. Adult women were also reported as using this word to describe their condition after an alleged rape. Elizabeth London, wife of John, was described in July 1730 as having ‘ran about, and rav’d, and tore like a mad Woman, saying, she was ruin’d, she was ruin’d’.35 Similarly, in February 1775, an eighteen-year-old girl, Elizabeth Harris, told the court that she begged William Priddle to allow her to leave his chamber, saying ‘I down’d of my knees and begged him for Christs sake not to ruin me’.36 This word had several connotations. It not only referred to the breaking of a woman’s chastity—and hence to the loss of her social standing and reputation—but also to the breaking of the integrity of the body through destruction of virginity if there had not yet been experience of sexual intercourse, as well as to infection with venereal disease where this occurred. Thus Elizabeth Harris, when pressed about what exactly William Priddle had done to her, told the court ‘I do tell you, he forced me quite entirely, to the ruin of my body’.37 Harris here specifically equated the loss of her virginity with the ‘ruin’ of her body. She repeatedly told witnesses that she had been ‘ruined’ and her perception of the severity of this injury to her body and to the social condition of her person was emphasized by further judging it as ‘entirely’ and ‘utterly’ ruined. In October 1786 sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Smith’s aunt told the court that they had gone to a magistrate to accuse William Hodge of rape because Elizabeth ‘said her master had been the ruin of her, and had been in bed with her’.38 Thus loss of sexual chastity was consistently described throughout this period as the occasion of a girl or woman’s ‘ruin’, and it referred to both the impact upon honour and reputation of having sexual intercourse outside the legitimate confines of marriage, and to the physical effects upon the body when this meant loss of virginity. Ruination was also perceived as a consequence of infection with a venereal disease, discovery of which was often what brought to light that a child had

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  187 been sexually assaulted. When in June 1774 the mother of two-year-old Ann Radford examined her daughter and found her to have a discharge of ‘a great deal of matter’, she told Henry Dawson ‘my child is ruined! Is ruined!’39 Her repetition of this judgement of her daughter’s condition serves to emphasize its gravity and the depth of her distress on its discovery. There was thus clearly a perception that premature and extramarital sexual contact spoiled the child, whether this was in ruining a reputation for chastity and hence future marital prospects, or by infecting her with a nasty disease for which the remedy was unpleasant and likely to further ruin the child’s health, and the cure uncertain. Girls who spent time with boys were therefore judged to be putting themselves at risk of ruination as this might potentially lead to sexual activity. This risk was indicated by the uncle of twelve-year-old Elizabeth Watson when he testified (in his own defence, to suggest someone else might have had sex with her) in July 1768 that her mother had beaten a boy of eighteen who lived in a room above them for being with her daughter, and that he had ‘told her mother several times the girl would be ruined’.40 Some girls themselves used the language of ruination when telling others that they had been raped, as did twelveyear-old Sarah Pearse in 1721 when ‘she said her Master had ruined her’.41 A witness also testified in February 1754 that Anne Albina Barnard, also aged twelve, had said to her that Stephen Hope ‘had ruined her’,42 and at the trial in July 1772 of John Coates for the rape of Anna Dixon, again aged twelve, a witness testified that ‘she said she was ruined’, because Coates ‘got to me while I was asleep . . . and did you know what’.43 Although the Church Courts were weakened following the Restoration and prosecutions of adultery and fornication fell significantly in the early eighteenth century and had almost ceased entirely by the 1730s, sex was still expected to take place within marriage. As Dabhoiwala has pointed out, ‘The idea of carnal licence was incessantly deplored and attacked, and most men and women continued to respect the ideals of sexual discipline’.44 The discovery of a child’s loss of virginity or sexual contact was thus regarded as a ‘misfortune’ for both the girl herself, and for her family, having a potentially negative impact upon her sexual reputation, and by association, upon the family’s good name.45 This language suggests that those whose prosecutions failed because witnesses, or the child’s own evidence, indicated that there was consent were therefore more likely to have been regarded as ‘ruined’ because their consent meant that they were unchaste. As noted, the age of consent for a girl for the purposes of the prosecution of rape was ten. Below the age of ten a girl’s consent was therefore irrelevant. Such girls would also be expected to be prepubescent, and occasionally the discovery of blood on a child’s undergarments gave rise to suspicion that she had been harmed precisely because it was thought to be extraordinary for the blood to be ‘natural’, that is, menstrual, in a child under ten. For example, John Cannon’s rape of nine-yearold Mary Faucet in 1749 was discovered when her mother found blood on

188  Sarah Toulalan her daughter’s linen and took it to show a woman who lived upstairs, Mary Bishop, ‘and told her my Daughter was very Forward’. On being asked what she meant by ‘forward’, Susan Faucet showed Bishop the linen, to which Bishop responded by telling her, ‘that could be no natural Thing’. Bishop further elucidated: ‘It can never be That, says I, at 9 Years of Age; it must be something else, and therefore I would have you ask others that know more than I do’.46 Although Bishop did not say explicitly that she meant menstrual blood, referring only to ‘That’ and to the child’s young age, her later description of the linen as ‘bloody’ leaves little doubt that her assumption was that Mary was too young at the age of nine to have begun menstruating, and therefore the blood can only be a symptom of something else, most probably of a sexual contact, because the linen was also ‘very nasty’ and ‘greenish and whitish’ indicating a venereal infection.47 In all the reports of cases where girls are under the age of consent there are therefore no questions in court about prior sexual behaviour, nor any suggestion that they might be held responsible for what had happened, even when it was revealed in court that the accused had had repeated sexual contact with the child.48 The absence of ‘victim-blaming’ is particularly remarkable in the trial of Stephen Arrowsmith for the rape of eight-year-old Elizabeth Hopkins in December 1678. Arrowsmith, it was reported, ‘had had to do with her for half a year together every Sunday’. A witness told the court that Hopkins had told her that she did not reveal what was happening because ‘she took Pleasure in it’.49 Nevertheless, the court made it very clear, ‘with great detestation and abhorrence of so Horrid and Vile an Offence’, that the law made it clear that it was rape whether it took place ‘with, or without her Consent’.50 Even though the witness testimony indicated that Hopkins had been a willing participant because she found it pleasureable, the Court made it clear that she could not be considered culpable in any way because she was below the age at which she could be considered capable of consent. Garthine Walker has also recently pointed out in a discussion of some of these cases involving young girls that ‘The girls were not held accountable for these encounters in any way’.51 While this is certainly true for the court, as the discussion above makes clear, there are two occasions on which it seems to be the case that a parent or other relative appears to blame the child for what has happened to her. In September 1734 during the trial of Thomas Slade for the rape of Margaret Thomson, aged six, of which he was acquitted, there is an apparent suggestion that her parents may have held her responsible for allowing him to interfere with her. It was reported that ‘the Prisoner was a Porter at Lion’s-Inn, that he had been seen to take indecent liberties with the Child: And her Parents being inform’d of it, they whipt her, and charged her never to go near him again’.52 The parents here seem to have punished Margaret for what had been done to her, although it is possible that they may simply have been using drastic measures to frighten her into keeping away from him. Similarly, when it is discovered that

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  189 nine-year-old Phillis Holmes is poxed, and her uncle told of it, his language when asking Phillis who had done this to her suggests that he blames her: he exclaims, ‘O you b—h, you are poxed! Hussey, who has meddled with you’.53 However, in this instance, her uncle is shown usually to treat Phillis very harshly—he kicks her and allows her only bread and water for weeks at a time when she has done something to displease him—so his response, as also that of the parents of Margaret Thomson, is not necessarily indicative of more general attitudes. It was far more usual for parents and others to be distressed about what had happened to their child and to direct their ire towards the person who had injured her, often indicated by the strong desire to prosecute and see him punished.54 A slightly different picture, however, emerges when we look at girls over the age of consent, at those aged between ten and fourteen. Although there is evidence to show that juries did not necessarily accept that girls just over the age of consent were really capable of giving consent to sex, and did not want to accept that acquiescence procured through bribing the child with money or gifts constituted understanding of consent, there is also some evidence that over the age of consent a young girl’s prior behaviour was questioned and taken into account. John Hunter was acquitted of the rape of Grace Pitts, aged just over ten, in April 1747 because she willingly went with him into another room and sat in his lap in exchange for an orange, nor did she cry out when he entered her body to alert anyone that this was against her will, nor did he use force to achieve his desire. Although it was made clear to the court that his actions were judged iniquitous, and that the way Hunter obtained her consent was thought to be through ‘Delusion and Deceit’, nevertheless such consent did not constitute ‘Force’ for ‘there is in some Measure the Consent of the Will’.55 This reported clarification of the legal understanding of consent by the judge suggests that the attitudes of both judge and jury in this case were not at all condemnatory of the child, despite the proof of her consent. In other cases the question of the child’s character was raised.56 In several other trials questions were asked, or testimony given, that were more explicitly about the child’s chastity and sexual immodesty, even when the child was as young as ten or eleven and thus only just over the age of consent, and also most probably still prepubescent. There are four such cases, dating from the first half of the eighteenth century, within a sixteenyear period, suggesting that it was thought possible at this time that a child only just over the age of consent might have a degree of sexual awareness.57 A witness at the trial in February 1719 of Sir John Murry for the rape of ten-year-old Mary Mackneal, testified that Mackneal behaved herself ‘very impudently’ and that she was ‘very familier’ with a man, John Jones, who she let ‘into the Room in her Shift, who laid there an Hour’, allowing him to kiss her and to ‘put his Hands into the bed where she was’.58 This evidence suggested to the court that Mackneal had behaved immodestly and unchastely with one man and was therefore likely to have done so willingly

190  Sarah Toulalan with another. Similarly, in 1728, a witness, Elizabeth Thursly, gave evidence that Mary Westbury, aged ten, ‘was a forward wicked Girl, and came frequently to the Prisoner’s Room, though she was ordered to the contrary’.59 The accused, Frances Sibley, ‘having a wicked Appetite, took . . . Advantage of her Folly, and deluded her, though it did not appear that he had ravished her’.60 Such statements suggest simultaneously that Mary was a willing participant in the sexual activity that took place and that Sibley took advantage of her lack of understanding. Mary’s father, Edward Westbury, himself gave evidence that, on being accused of abusing her and taken before a magistrate, Sibley said that ‘somebody else had known the Girl before him’.61 It is probable that Sibley intended, by this statement, to demonstrate that Mary was unchaste and therefore was more likely to have consented to sex with him. Witnesses at the trial of Julian Brown for the rape of Susan Marshall, aged eleven, in October 1735 also gave evidence that implied her lack of chastity. One witness testified that while talking with another girl about ‘how they had served two Boys . . . this Girl said, . . . I love to play at Man and Wife, but I do not like him. She came two or three times that Day for Gin . . .’.62 Another witness said that she had not heard any noise from the room below in which Susan Marshall said the rape had taken place, and her response when asked why she did not cry out was that it was because ‘he gave me a Dram of anniseed, and I shall have a pretty Baby of my own to nurse, and that will be better than crying out’. Yet another witness testified ‘that Suky Marshall was well known to every body for all manner of Impudence’.63 Witnesses thus sketched for the court a picture of a young girl who regularly drank alcohol, who appeared to be sexually knowledgeable, and who did not behave in a chaste and modest fashion. In September 1735 Phillip Brown, accused of the rape of his master’s daughter, Mary Gibbs, aged eleven, testified in his defence that ‘She came to me and threw herself upon the Bed’. His mother further testified in his support that she had ‘heard the Boy say she was a very bold Girl’, implying that Mary was not entirely innocent.64 The presentation of such evidence in court suggests that girls as young as ten and eleven, and therefore only just over the age of consent, but as yet unlikely to have reached puberty, were understood as possibly having some degree of sexual awareness or knowledge and thus to behave in ways that were immodest. This awareness would be sufficient to justify a claim of consent by a man seeking to escape prosecution for rape, even if it was nevertheless thought by the court that such a young girl was unlikely to completely understand the consequences for her body and for her social standing, and thus to have been ‘deluded’ and taken advantage of. Frances Sibley’s assertion that ‘somebody else had known the Girl before him’ also alludes to contemporary thinking about sexualization before puberty, where repeated sexual activity might provoke pleasure in sex.65 Girls who were nearer to the age at which they might reach puberty were perhaps thought more likely to exhibit knowledge of sex and sexual behaviour, and for the court to more readily accept such descriptions of their

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  191 character and behaviour. Although the age of fourteen was the more usual age at which girls were thought likely to begin their sexual development and to start menstruating, it was also understood that it might begin earlier, around the age of twelve.66 The Sessions Papers themselves supply at least one example of a girl of twelve who seems to have had her sentence of death stayed as she was found to be pregnant: ‘Margaret Beard, a Girle, about 12 Years of Age’ was convicted of ‘stealing a piece of Silk, value 6 l. from Mr. Coldicot, near Ludgate’. She was sentenced to death but was then subsequently listed among those women who were found to be with child after sentence: ‘Margaret Beard was suspected after Judgment’.67 Beard was later reprieved and her sentence reduced to transportation in January 1692.68 It was also more likely that it would be questioned whether girls aged twelve and above had begun menstruating to establish the nature of any blood alleged to have been caused by tearing or ‘laceration’ during forced penetration. In the 1797 trial of John Briant for the rape of Jane Bell, aged fourteen, care was taken to establish that Bell had not yet begun to menstruate at the time of her alleged rape, so that the presence of blood from any injuries could not be explained as ‘natural’, that is, menstrual.69 Having experienced sexual development that was thought to bring with it sexual feelings, girls of this age were possibly thought to be more likely to exhibit sexual behaviour, and thus to acquire a reputation for lack of chastity. William Cunnington was found not guilty of the rape of twelve-yearold Ann Williams in September 1738 after two witnesses gave evidence of her behaviour that suggested it was highly questionable and suggestive of unchastity. Jenny Wademan and Margaret Norman both testified ‘that the Girl used to lie out o’nights frequently in Drury Lane, and Covent Garden, and that she told them, Gentlemen used to give her 6d and a Dram’.70 Drury Lane and Covent Garden were areas well known for prostitution and their evidence implied that she regularly sold herself there, and was thus likely to have become infected with ‘the Foul Disease’ through this activity.71 This implication was given further weight when a boy aged thirteen, William Abbey, testified that ‘Nan Williams call’d him to play with her, and gave him the foul Disease’. The boy’s infection was confirmed by the evidence of a soldier named Wells who claimed that ‘he knew how to treat a Venereal Patient, and that the Boy was then under his Care’.72 Similarly, Henry Burt, accused of the rape of Mary Lye, aged thirteen, in May 1717, secured his acquittal by admitting that he had lain with her and telling the court that ‘he indeed was eager and she not very unwilling, and that she came to him about a month after and undrest her self, came into the Bed, and lay with him all night, which she did not deny’.73 By demonstrating a desire to continue engaging in sexual intercourse with him, Mary Lye effectively undermined any claim to unwillingness on a prior occasion.74 Others, like Frances Sibley, claimed that a girl had prior sexual experience. At the trial of William Willis in December 1715, for the alleged rape of thirteen-year-old Phebe Shaw, one witness, in support of Willis, ‘depos’d that the Child had told her, a Country-man lay

192  Sarah Toulalan with her as she was upon the Road in her Way to London’.75 Such indications of lack of chastity and immodesty that resulted in a man’s acquittal can only have had a deleterious impact upon a girl’s reputation, marginalizing her from the community of respectable households. Although not always specifically articulated, families—and courts— clearly thought that the ruination of a child through rape or sexual assault, and infection with venereal disease, merited redress. It can be seen that the restoration of a girl’s reputation played a significant part in motivating some parents to pursue a prosecution as a conviction would prove that sexual intercourse had not been consensual and therefore that the girl was chaste. The mother of fifteen-year-old Martha Linett stated in court in October 1780 that she wanted ‘to see my child righted’.76 This desire to clear a daughter’s reputation can be seen most explicitly in the trial of David Scott for the rape of eleven-year-old Mary Homewood in September 1796. Mary’s father, Thomas Homewood, told Scott ‘you have ruined my child’, but did not immediately seek to have him apprehended and a charge brought against him for her rape.77 Homewood told the court when he eventually did prosecute Scott that his initial reluctance to do so was because he ‘thought it would make an alarm in the neighbourhood, and disgrace the child’s character; I thought he would go off to Scotland’.78 Homewood and his wife were clearly willing to not prosecute Scott, provided he left the neighbourhood so that their daughter’s sexual experience, however unwanted, would not become common knowledge in the local community, thus besmirching her reputation. But Scott did not go to Scotland, neither did his wife keep knowledge of Mary’s rape to herself; consequently, Thomas Homewood did charge Scott with rape. He explained his reasoning to the court to account for his delay in prosecuting Scott: ‘I found he did not go out of the way; and as my wife had made it known to Mrs. Green, I thought we could but be disgraced’.79 Homewood was clearly worried that it would become common knowledge in his community that his child was no longer virginal, so that his daughter’s—and so the family’s—reputation would be ruined. Homewood expresses here the belief that the family’s reputation was dependent upon the community’s perception of the chastity of his daughter: contemporary commentators held that the good order of the family was paramount for the good order of communities, and by extension of the state as a whole. Much has been written about how a man’s reputation and standing in his community would be undermined by his inability to control the sexual behaviour of his wife, but his social standing was also affected by the sexual behaviour of all those who lived in his household, including children and servants.80 Under further cross-examination that explicitly sought to establish that he would not have prosecuted if Scott had left the area, Homewood agreed that he was motivated solely by a desire to keep it quiet: ‘if he had gone out of the way, so that it was not to be known, I would have put up with the misfortune’.81 In seeking to rectify his child’s ruin by bringing a prosecution for rape, Thomas Homewood tells us that there was indeed a perception that

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  193 a child’s experience of sex, even in a child as young as eleven years old and however coerced, could have a deleterious effect on her subsequent reputation. A successful prosecution could go some way towards rectifying this by proving that it had been against the child’s will.82 The language of ruination was also used on discovery of a child’s infection with venereal disease, although it is not always clear whether this referred to the disease itself or to the sexual act that brought the infection, or, indeed, to both. In September 1766, nine-year-old Phillis Holmes’s uncle testified that when her nurse showed him her stained shift that indicated she had a venereal infection, she cried, ‘O Lord, Sir, Phillis is ruined!’83 The infection of a child with venereal disease was clearly regarded as a great misfortune that would have an impact upon her future reputation. One witness testified that the mother of eleven-year-old Elizabeth Hodgkin, infected with venereal disease, had said of Anthony Barnes, who was tried for her rape in July 1750, that ‘she would stick as close by him as the shirt to his back, except he would come down and give the child a good fortune, and send her into the country, that it might not blast her character’.84 The signs of venereal disease, or pox, on the body marked those displaying them as immoral, leading to their categorization as ‘whore’ or ‘whoremaster’ and the imposition of punishments such as incarceration in Bridewell and whipping.85 Paul Griffiths has suggested that those committed to Bridewell might admit to another disease ‘to avoid the slur of pox’.86 Kevin Siena has noted that ‘The foul disease was pejorative from virtually the moment it walked onto the European stage in the 1490s’ and that the use of ‘pocky’ as an insult continued well into the eighteenth-century implying ‘sexual deviancy’ and ‘filth’ and serving as ‘a rich pejorative for public shaming’.87 Venereal disease was regarded as shameful, affecting the private parts of the body and indicating a lack of sexual chastity, especially as it was understood to be spread by prostitutes. When Samuel Pepys thought his brother was ill with the pox, he wrote in his diary in March 1664 that ‘if he lives, he will not be able to show his head—which will be a very gret shame to me’.88 Siena has further argued that ‘Even the suspicion of venereal taint could be enough to thwart young people’s marriage prospects’ and that it could similarly affect their employment, even leading to suicide.89 The ruination that infection was thought to bring to a child was not only of the body, then, but also of the child’s future prospects, economic and marital. Furthermore, the treatment of venereal disease also had long-term consequences both for health and appearance. Venereal disease, or the pox, which encompassed different infections that we now understand as separate diseases, was usually treated with mercury, which was itself poisonous and had terrible side effects.90 The cure was often regarded as worse than the disease itself; Siena has shown how some chose to take their own lives rather than submit to treatment, or to continue suffering without it.91 The symptoms of the pox were themselves unpleasant, including sores or ulcers, foul discharge from the genitals, and, in later stages, facial disfigurement as

194  Sarah Toulalan the nose collapsed and hair fell out.92 As Siena has observed, the ‘symptoms were abhorrent: nasty, stinking, and putrid’.93 Mercury, which was also given to children in the form of salivations, pills, and topical ointments for sores and rashes on the skin, caused nausea, wasting, tremors and fatigue, inflammation and ulceration of the mouth and throat, loosened teeth, and caused kidney problems. Treatment could thus leave a person in a weakened state of health and with beauty blighted, and could not be relied upon to completely cure the infection, whatever its exact nature. Initial symptoms from the first stage of a disease might abate or disappear, suggesting cure, but later stages brought different or more severe symptoms, including deterioration of ulcers, pains in the bones, and skin eruptions. The final stage of pox, in addition to further unpleasant physical symptoms, could bring madness and, eventually, death. A child infected with the disease thus faced an uncertain, potentially painful and difficult future that might end in a premature and unpleasant death. Forty-three per cent of girls aged fourteen and under in this sample were diagnosed as suffering from venereal disease as a consequence of rape or sexual assault, rising to fifty per cent if those with uncertain diagnoses are included—those where the child had a genital discharge but the medical practitioner who examined her would not commit himself to a firm diagnosis of venereal infection. An infection with venereal disease was, of course, evidence that a child had had sexual contact with another and was not therefore chaste. Although it was stated in some treatises on venereal disease that it might be transmitted non-sexually, by contact with infected matter on linen, for example, or by hand, the primary and most likely means of infection was understood to be sexual. In a significant number of cases tried at the Old Bailey where a child had been infected with venereal disease, the question was raised with those giving medical evidence about their examination of the child’s genitals of whether she could have been infected in ways other than by penetration. A number of those found not guilty of rape, despite the child’s infection, were acquitted because penetration was not proven, and it was established that it was possible to infect a person by touching with a hand on which there was infected matter from a genital discharge. Nevertheless, such a method of transmission indicated that a child had been sexually assaulted, and it was these cases that invariably led to re-indictment on a charge of sexual assault with intent to rape. Such cases can be seen to have been regarded by the court, as well as by parents, as a serious matter. In July 1750 William Tankling was found not guilty of the rape of Anne Collings, aged three, but was then tried and convicted for assault. The report specifies that the indictment for this second trial was for assault and for giving the child the foul disease, so there was clearly some sense that this was a specific harm done to a child that needed redress.94 Tankling was sentenced to stand twice in the pillory in one month, and then once again at the end of his prison sentence, as well as to be imprisoned in Newgate for three years, and to find security for his good behaviour for a further four years.95 The severity of this sentence

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  195 suggests that the court felt very strongly about his crime. J. M. Beattie has noted that in the seventeenth century offenders were usually sentenced to stand three times, ‘quite often for two hours each, and at a time that would guarantee the largest crowd’, but that this was ‘more likely’ to have been reduced to one session of only one hour in the early eighteenth century.96 The imposition of repeated punishment in the pillory therefore suggests that the crime was judged to be particularly heinous, especially as a stint in the pillory could lead to serious injury or even death, depending on the hostility of the crowd and what it threw at the prisoner, which could range from rotten fruit and dead cats to stones and bricks. The court’s view may have been influenced by the child’s mother’s reaction to her child’s ‘misfortune’: she did not appear in court when Tankling was tried for her rape because she was so affected by the harm done to her child that she ‘went distracted upon this account, and died’.97 Parents, guardians, and other relatives as well as judges and juries thus responded to a child’s infection with venereal disease through sexual contact with great concern; it was a serious matter that had grave consequences for her future, potentially ruining not only her health but also her reputation and future prospects. Sexual crimes against children, and their subsequent prosecution, thus had several consequences for girls that were likely to have placed them on the margins of their communities. Premature and extramarital sexual experience in itself could ‘ruin’ a girl, taking her virginity and potentially affecting her future employment and marriageability. If infected with venereal disease, she not only carried with her continuing physical signs of her sexual experience that was suggestive of promiscuity and moral ruin to those she would meet in future, but also was ‘ruined’ physically as both the disease and its remedies took their toll on her body. The physical signs of sexually contracted disease would mark her out as on the margins of respectable society, potentially unable to participate in what was expected to be the usual course of a woman’s life: marriage followed by the establishment of a household and family. Such considerations impelled families to bring prosecutions for rape and sexual assault, despite the expense and the public revelation in court of the household and its order—or disorder—to establish that a child had been forced against her will rather than a willing participant in an immoral act, and to gain some redress for the wrong done to her, and, by extension, to the family’s honour. However, if a prosecution was unsuccessful, and a man was able to secure his acquittal by showing that she had consented, or at least persuading the jury that it was highly likely that she had done so by casting sufficient doubt on her chastity by calling her reputation into question, then her good name and reputation would be ruined. The publication of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers as well as reporting, however minimal, in cheap news print meant that both vindication and blighting of reputation might become known more widely than the immediate communities in which girls lived and worked, though how far this may have actually had an impact upon a particular girl’s future is impossible to know.

196  Sarah Toulalan

Notes 1 For example, see Richard Galpin, ‘Rape of Three-Year-Old Girl Shocks Afghans’. BBC News Asia, 20 November, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worldasia-30127463, accessed 3 February 2015. 2 Sexual assaults of boys—or men—were prosecuted as sodomy or as assault with intent to commit sodomy; rape was defined as penetration of a female, usually with seminal emission into the vagina. Although there has been some debate over the extent to which male social standing and reputation were affected by their sexual behaviour, nevertheless a double standard prevailed in which a woman’s sexual behaviour was policed more closely and defined her reputation. See Bernard Capp, ‘The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 162 (1999), 70–100; Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959), 195–216; Keith Thomas, ‘The Puritans and Adultery: The Act of 1650 Reconsidered’ in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), pp. 257–82. On male sexual behaviour and its condemnation, see Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 143; Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London, 1999), p. 79; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), p. 81; David M. Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 63–4. 3 I have argued elsewhere that judges at the Old Bailey treated infection with venereal disease as a very serious matter: Sarah Toulalan, ‘ “Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of a Person?”: Constructing the Child Rapist in Early Modern England’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 23 (2014), 45–6. 4 There is only one case at the Old Bailey where this possibility for prosecution is invoked: the trial of John Osborne for the rape of Susanna Tabart in January 1749, indicted ‘for a second time for knowing the said person being an infant under twelve years of age’. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbailey online.org, version 7.0, 27 January 2015) [hereafter OBP], January 1749, trial of John Osborne (t17490113–11). For a discussion of the change in law and its purpose, see Antony E. Simpson, ‘Vulnerability and the Age of Female Consent: Legal Innovation and Its Effects on Prosecutions for Rape in Eighteenth-Century London’ in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester, 1987), pp. 183–7. 5 Sir Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae. The History of the Pleas of the Crown (London, 1736), p. 302. This question of competence to give evidence was central to whether or not the child’s voice was heard in court, and what weight it was given. 6 See my discussion in Sarah Toulalan, ‘ “Unripe” Bodies: Children, Sex and the Body in Early Modern England’ in Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (eds), Sexual Histories: Bodies and Desires Uncovered (Basingstoke, 2011). 7 The boundaries of childhood in this period are highly debatable and any definition by age is open to challenge given the fluidity of biological, social, cultural, and legal markers both within the period and over time. See Anna-Christina Giovanopoulos, ‘The Legal Status of Children in Eighteenth-Century England’ in Anja Müller (ed.), Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 46–7. Hugh Cunningham has observed that ‘in nearly all societies people have differed quite substantially in their thinking on the age at which childhood ends’ and categorized a child in his subsequent discussions as ‘anyone under fifteen’: Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  197 in Western Society Since 1500 (London and New York, 1995), p. 17. For a discussion of age as a category of historical analysis, see Anna Davin, ‘What Is a Child?’ in Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (eds), Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State (Manchester, 1999), and the first edition of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (2008), particularly: Steven Mintz, ‘Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis’; Leslie Paris, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Age, Stages, and Historical Analysis’; Peter N. Stearns, ‘Challenges in the History of Childhood’. 8 Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Employment and Underemployment of Children in England, c.1680–1851’, Past and Present 126 (1990), especially pp. 123–6, 131–3. See also Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven and London, 1994). 9 See my discussion in Sarah Toulalan, ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Late Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century London: Rape, Sexual Assault and the Denial of Agency’ in Nigel Goose and Katrina Honeyman (eds), Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914 (Farnham, 2013), pp. 27–31. 10 Although both boys and girls can be identified as having suffered sexual assaults at this time, I am only going to discuss the experiences of girls, as to include boys raises a range of different issues to do with the prosecution of, and attitudes towards, sodomy. Any trace of boys as the objects of women’s sexual interest is primarily anecdotal with such incidents only very rarely making an appearance in the legal record. William Naphy has pointed out one case from 1565 Geneva of a woman, Thévena l’Hérétier, who was arrested for abusing an eight-yearold boy. See William Naphy, Sex Crimes From Renaissance to Enlightenment (Stroud, 2002), p. 111. For two anecdotal accounts, see E. Fenton, Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature, Containing a Description of Sundry Strange Things, Seeming Monstrous in Our Eyes and Judgement, Because We Are Not Privie to the Reasons of Them. Gathered Out of Divers Learned Authors as Well Greeke as Latine, Sacred as Prophane (London, 1569), p. 12, and John Marten, A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, in Both Sexes (London, 1708), p. 37. 11 See Esther Snell, ‘Trials in Print: Narratives of Rape Trials in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey’ in David Lemmings (ed.), Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850 (Farnham, 2012), pp. 24–7. 12 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven and London, 1995), Chapter 6; Courtney Thomas, ‘ “The Honour & Credite of the Whole House”: Family Unity and Honour in Early Modern England’, Cultural and Social History 10 (2013), 329–45; Garthine Walker, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996), 235–45. See for example, the wreckage of Lady Castlehaven’s reputation and place in society following the revelations in court of her rape and adultery: Cynthia Herrup, ‘ “To Pluck Bright Honour From the Pale-Faced Moon”: Gender and Honour in the Castlehaven Story’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996), especially 152–8; Cynthia Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford, 1999), p. 79. Faramerz Dabhoiwala has, however, argued, with reference to Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, that for a high-ranking woman, lack of chastity might blacken her character but did not affect her ‘quality’ or ‘condition’ and that her honour could even have been enhanced depending on the status of those with whom she was unchaste. Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘The Construction of Honour, Reputation and Status in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996), 211.

198  Sarah Toulalan 13 Linda A. Pollock, ‘Honour, Gender, and Reconciliation in Elite Culture, 1570– 1700’, Journal of British Studies 46 (2007), 5; Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), pp. 2–4, 61–2. As Dabhoiwala notes, a woman’s ‘unchastity always betrayed itself in every aspect of a woman’s behavour’. Dabhoiwala, ‘The Construction of Honour’, p. 207. 14 Garthine Walker, ‘Sexual Violence and Rape in Europe, 1500–1750’ in Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (eds), The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 1500 to the Present (London and New York, 2013), pp. 434–5; Shani D’Cruze, ‘Sexual Violence Since 1750’ in Toulalan and Fisher (eds), The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, pp. 447–9. 15 Initially, not all trials were reported. Estimates of the numbers of reported—and prosecuted—rapes, using the Sessions Papers are thus unreliable as many are missing, particularly before 1720. The online resource entitles them Old Bailey Proceedings, but I refer to them here as the Sessions Papers. A succinct summary of the publishing history of the Proceedings can be found at http://www. oldbaileyonline.org/static/Publishinghistory.jsp#a1678–1729. See also J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), pp. 2–4. 16 There are other reported accounts of selected trials in short pamphlets but no other consistent reporting of assize court proceedings as for the Old Bailey. See David Lemmings, ‘Introduction: Criminal Courts, Lawyers and the Public Sphere’ in David Lemmings (ed.), Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere, pp. 1–21. 17 See Peter Wagner, ‘The Pornographer in the Courtroom: Trial Reports About Cases of Sexual Crimes and Delinquencies as a Genre of Eighteenth-Century Erotica’ in P. G. Boucé (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 1982). 18 David Lemmings, Professors of the Law: Barristers and English Legal Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), Chapter 6. 19 Thomas, ‘The Honour & Credite of the Whole House’, p. 330. On the importance of male reputation in defence of an accusation of rape, see, for example, my discussion of George Tennant’s prosecution for the rape of Mary Craggs, aged nine, in Toulalan, ‘Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of a Person?’, p. 36. 20 See Toulalan, ‘Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of a Person?’, pp. 47–51. 21 Laura Gowing, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London’, History Workshop Journal 35 (1993), 3. 22 For an example, see Toulalan, ‘Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of a Person?’, p. 28. See also Garthine Walker’s discussion in ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England’, Gender & History 10 (1998), 7–8. 23 John H. Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers’, University of Chicago Law Review 45 (1978), 271: ‘Most of what was said at an Old Bailey sessions must have been omitted’. See also Beattie, Policing and Punishment, especially Chapter 6, and Robert B. Shoemaker, ‘The Old Bailey Proceedings and the Representation of Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies 47 (2008), 559–80. 24 Although a substantial number of the original manuscript indictments survive, original depositions for only some of the cases prosecuted at the Old Bailey are still extant. The indictments are highly formulaic and provide little further useful information, except occasionally the exact age of a child who may be referred to in the Sessions Papers simply as ‘under ten’. These records are now held at the London Metropolitan Archives; some depositions are also available online in London Lives (http://www.londonlives.org). 25 Adam Martindale, ‘The Life of Adam Martindale Written by Himself’, edited by Rev. Richard Parkinson, The Chetham Society, Old Series 4 (1845), pp. 206–7.

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  199 6 Snell, ‘Trials in Print’, p. 26. 2 27 Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae, p. 635. As Walker has noted, this was more a comment about the difficulties of bringing sufficient proof to convict rather than that ‘malicious’ women brought accusations against ‘innocent’ men. Guilty verdicts were achieved in just eighteen per cent of all cases, rising to twenty-five per cent for cases where the girls were aged fourteen or under, and to thirty per cent of all those cases involving girls under the age of consent, i.e., under ten years. Garthine Walker, ‘Rape, Acquittal and Culpability in Popular Crime Reports in England, c.1670–c.1750’, Past and Present 220 (2013), 124–27. 28 Randolph Trumbach, ‘Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991), 195. 29 J. A. Sharpe, ‘Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York’, Borthwick Papers 58 (1980), 2–3. 30 There is some very small evidence to indicate that juries were not always convinced that a girl aged just over ten was, in fact, capable of meaningfully giving consent. See my discussion in ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century London’, pp. 36–7. 31 L. R. Poos has noted that in late medieval England, despite clear evidence from pregnancy and illegitimate births, prosecutions for fornication or adultery were not always pursued in the church courts. See L. R. Poos, ‘Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts of Pre-Reformation England’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25 (1995), 585. See, also for the later sixteenth century, C. A. Haigh, ‘Slander and the Church Courts in the Sixteenth Century’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 78 (1975), 4–5. 32 Anna Clark, ‘Whores and Gossips: Sexual Reputation in London 1770–1825’ in Arina Angerman et al (eds), Current Issues in Women’s History (London and New York, 1989), p. 233. Clark defines ‘Plebeian’ here as ‘the mass of people below the level of the middle class, ranging from the labouring poor up to these small shopkeepers and tradesmen’. 33 There is now a substantial historiography of defamation. See, for example: Gowing, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult’, 1–21; Laura Gowing, ‘Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London’ in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill, 1994), pp. 26–47; Gowing, Domestic Dangers; Haigh. ‘Slander and the Church Courts’; Tim Meldrum, ‘A Women’s Court in London: Defamation at the Bishop of London’s Consistory Court, 1700–1745’, London Journal 19 (1994), 1–20; Sharpe, ‘Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England’. 34 Dabhoiwala, ‘The Construction of Honour, Reputation and Status’, p. 207. 35 OBP, July 1730, William West (t17300704–62). 36 OBP, February 1775, William Priddle (t17750201–1). See Tim Hitchcock, ‘ “Unlawfully begotten on her body”: Illegitimacy and the Parish Poor in St.  Luke’s Chelsea’ in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke and London, 1997), p. 72. 37 OBP, February 1775, William Priddle (t17750201–1). 38 OBP, October 1786, William Hodge (t17861025–56). 39 OBP, July 1774, Richard Freelove (t17740706–57). The surgeon who examined Ann Radford initially thought she had a venereal disease, but having found no sign of disease on the fifteen-year-old boy accused of her rape, Richard Freelove, he concluded that her “complaint” arose from the ‘laceration’ only. Freelove was acquitted. 40 OBP, July 1768, Henry Johnson (t17680706–42).

200  Sarah Toulalan 41 42 43 44

OBP, December 1721, Christopher Samuel Graff (t17211206–67). OBP, February 1754, Stephen Hope (t17540227–56). OBP, July 1772, John Coates (t17720715–52). Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London, 2012), p. 117. 45 Tanya Evans has noted how misfortune ‘was a euphemism that was widely used in popular parlance during the eighteenth century to describe the consequences of women participating in illicit sex’. See Evans, ‘ “Unfortunate Objects”: London’s Unmarried Mothers in the Eighteenth Century’, Gender & History 17 (2005), 135. 46 OBP, September 1733, John Cannon (t17330912–55). See my discussion of puberty and sexual development in ‘ “Unripe” Bodies’, pp. 136–7. 47 OBP, September 1733, John Cannon (t17330912–55). Sara Read has discussed this case in relation to the euphemisms used by early modern women to refer to menstruation in her Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 61–2. 48 In one case there is a suggestion that the child has a bad reputation, but it is not clear that this reputation includes anything to do with sexual behaviour: in July 1694 Samuel Eales proved that he was not at home the day he was accused of raping Martha Warner, aged nine, and told the court ‘That the Girl was of Evil Repute’. OBP, July 1694, Samuel Eales (t16940711–37). 49 OBP, December 1678, Stephen Arrowsmith (t16781211e-2). 50 OBP, December 1678, Stephen Arrowsmith (t16781211e-2). 51 Walker, ‘Rape, Acquittal and Culpability’, p. 127. 52 OBP, September 1734, Thomas Slade (t17340911–6). 53 OBP, September 1766, Edward Brophy (t17660903–38). 54 On at least one occasion it can be seen that the judge makes financial provision for a father to further pursue a prosecution for sexual assault when rape was not proven to ensure that the accused did not go unpunished. See my discussion of this case in ‘Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of a Person?’, p. 38. 55 OBP, April 1747, John Hunter (t17470429–28). 56 Nevertheless a witness in this trial was asked about Grace’s behaviour, although it is not obvious that the question referred to possible immodesty or lack of chastity: ‘What Sort of a Child is it in it’s Behaviour?’ This question may have been asked to establish the nature of Grace’s character more generally, possibly to find out whether or not she was a child who might tell lies and therefore whether or not her testimony against Hunter could be trusted (as occasionally happened in other trials). The witness’s response however hints at interpreting it as a question about her sexual propriety, when she answers that Grace is ‘A decent well behaved Child’. OBP, April 1747, John Hunter (t17470429–28). 57 This perhaps fits with Jennie Mills’s argument that for men at this time ‘to desire to have sexual intercourse with very young girls was entirely within the boundaries of acceptable sexual behaviour’. The corollary of such an understanding must be that it was thought that girls this young could be sexual. Jennie Mills, ‘Rape in Early Eighteenth-Century London: A Perversion “So Very Perplex’d” ’ in Julie Peakman (ed.), Sexual Perversions, 1670–1890 (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 141. See also my point about premature sexualization in ‘ “Unripe” Bodies’, 143–5. 58 OBP, February 1719, John Murry (t17190225–43). Sir John Murry was one of the very few gentlemen prosecuted for rape at the Old Bailey. 59 OBP, August 1728, Francis Sibley (t17280828–26). 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 OBP, October 1735, Julian Brown (t17351015–28).

Child Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault  201 63 Ibid. 64 OBP, September 1735, Phillip Brown (t17350911–90). 65 OBP, August 1728, Francis Sibley (t17280828–26). See my discussion in ‘ “Unripe” Bodies’, pp. 143–5. 66 For discussions of age of onset of menstruation, see my ‘ “Unripe” Bodies’, pp. 136–7; Read, Menstruation and the Female Body, Chapters 1 and 2. 67 OBP, May 1691 (s16910527–1). 68 OBP, January 1692, list of pardons (o16920115–6). 69 OBP, September 1797, John Briant (t17970920–12). 70 OBP, September 1738, William Cunnington (t17380906–26). 71 See Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (London, 1999); Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2007), pp. 188–91. 72 OBP, September 1738, William Cunnington (t17380906–26). 73 OBP, May 1717, Henry Burt (t17170501–67). 74 Garthine Walker has also noted how a defendant undermined a claim of rape by telling the court that the woman accusing him continued to frequent his house, thus demonstrating no fear of him: Walker, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence’, 10. See also Snell, ‘Trials in Print’, p. 28. 75 OBP, December 1715, William Willis (t17151207–52). 76 OBP, October 1780, Christopher Morris, Ann Lock, John Mills (t17801018–40). 77 OBP, September 1796, David Scott (t17960914–12). See also my discussion in ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century London’, pp. 33–4. 78 OBP, September 1796, David Scott (t17960914–12). 79 Ibid. 80 Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, especially Chapter 11; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, especially Chapter 3. 81 OBP, September 1796, David Scott (t17960914–12). 82 Randolph Trumbach has similarly concluded that ‘the possible stain on a daughter’s reputation, and on their own honor’ were most important to them, although here Trumbach draws this conclusion specifically in relation to the issue of her infection with venereal disease. Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution: Volume One, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago IL and London, 1998), p. 214. 83 OBP, September 1766, Edward Brophy (t17660903–38). 84 OBP, July 1750, Anthony Barnes (t17500711–33). 85 See Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 255, 266–67, 269. 86 Griffiths, Lost Londons, p. 269. 87 Kevin P. Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor: London’s ‘Foul Wards’, 1600–1800 (Rochester NY, 2004), pp. 36–7. 88 Entry for 14 March 1664, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London, 1970–83), V, p. 84. See also Siena’s discussion in Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor, pp. 31–2, 38. Siena cites further comments by Pepys. 89 Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor, p. 40. See also Kevin Siena, ‘Suicide as an Illness Strategy in the Long Eighteenth Century’ in John Weaver and David Wright (eds), Histories of Suicide: International Perspectives on Self-Destruction in the Modern World (Toronto, 2008). 90 For an excellent discussion of the pox as a single disease, see Kevin Siena, ‘Introduction’ in Kevin Siena (ed.), Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2005), pp. 12–4.

202  Sarah Toulalan 91 Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor, pp. 24–8. 92 Siena, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–29. 93 Ibid., p. 8. 94 Some indictments for rape also specified infection with disease, suggesting that this in itself was regarded as a serious form of harm done to the child. See for example, the indictment of George Manning for the rape of two-year-old Eleanor Clay, LMA MJ/SR/2695. Manning was, however, acquitted: OBP, April 1738, George Manning (t17380412–56). 95 OBP, July 1750, William Tankling (t17500711–25). 96 Beattie, Policing and Punishment, p. 307. 97 OBP, July 1750, William Tankling (t17500711–25).

11 Afterword Constructing Marginality in the Early Modern European City Fabrizio Nevola

On the 14 April 1464, the Concistoro, Siena’s supreme magistracy deliberated on the plight of Piera di Schiavonia, a prostitute who had been imprisoned in the city jail in the subterranean vaults of the Palazzo Pubblico for about a year.1 Her crime had been that of throwing rotten meat and two chickens (carne corrotta e due polli) into a well that belonged to the famous physician, Bartalo di Tura, thereby contaminating its water supply. At a first glance this is a minor incident turning around the regulation of vital resources; but there is, of course, also a backstory that tells us a good deal about social groups and power relations as well as spatial control in the city. Piera was one of many prostitutes that populated the cities of Italy, whose loconymic (di Schiavonia) indicates her likely origins in the countries of the Eastern Adriatic.2 Bartalo, on the other hand, was one of the most famous doctors of his day, was at the time a consultant physician to Pope Pius II Piccolomini, and also served in various capacities for the Sienese governing élite.3 The two might be said to be positioned at opposite ends of the social scale in Sienese society, and yet they lived in close proximity to one another, for the doctor’s grand house near the central piazza Salimbeni was almost adjacent to two hostels from which a number of prostitutes operated, the Albergo della Corona and Ospizio dell’Austro, both of them near to the church of San Donato.4 In January 1462 new rules drafted by the Ufficiali di Custodia, a group of officials charged with policing public space, specifically named the two hostels and banned prostitutes from working there.5 Bartalo was one of the officials that drew up these rules, which additionally required Dolbra and Francesca Slava to cease working in the city and leave on pain of a 25 lire fine. It has plausibly been proposed that Piera’s action sought some form of retribution on the physician for having expelled her conationals from the city and limited her own ability to work there. Piera’s act of revenge was not directed at Bartalo’s city-centre property however, but rather she targeted a well in Valli (on the southern edge of the city), where the physician had gardens where he grew the herbs and plants used in his medicines. While this was a suburban location, which she perhaps thought to be far from the public view, the garden was managed by a gardener, who was the named witness to the event that led to her imprisonment.

204  Fabrizio Nevola Piera’s offence was in the first instance one against the strict laws that protected water hygiene in the city; from at least the fourteenth century the ultimate sanction for contamination of the main aqueducts was capital punishment.6 In this case, the victim was not only a legislator, he was also a respected doctor and as such the effects of the water contamination had repercussions on his profession and reputation. However, in the context of a discussion about marginality, it is an incident rich in interpretative potential. Piera the prostitute and Bartalo the élite doctor are revealed to inhabit the same streets and neighbourhood in an area of the city centre that was densely crowded with magnate residences and churches but also hotels in the service of visitors, where prostitutes plied their trade, soliciting at street corners or at the doors of the alberghi. While the official city brothel was located at a regulated site behind the city hall—to some extent out of sight, but certainly under the strict control of city authorities—prostitution is here shown to inhabit prominent central areas.7 The legislation against prostitutes working in these areas clearly sought to set firmer boundaries between spaces licenced for prostitution and those that were not. In turn, the connections between centre and periphery in the city are also shown to be permeable, with the doctor owning property on the edges, where there were many such allotments or orti, as well as poorer residential districts. Piera’s action moreover is a reminder that within the city, even a location on its edges was subject to forms of public surveillance. Finally, the gardener’s word as witness confirms how status and honour carried weight in the legal system, as only upstanding citizens could bring accusations against prostitutes. What I think this brief example shows is that marginality is constituted in diverse ways, and indeed is often not easy to distinguish, define, or even locate. To an extent this could be said, unsurprisingly, to mirror the situation that we might identify in a comparable discussion of early modern community.8 Here, historiographical trends have moved away from definitions based on concepts of unity and belonging in favour of more heterogeneous and negotiated definitions in which complicating factors such as identity, space, and agency play a more significant role. These factors—and the underlying analysis of space as constitutive of meaning, developed by such scholars as Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre—underpin the ‘spatial turn’ in historical research that has tended to afford a growing significance to the actual social processes and interactions that occur in urban environments.9 It is this spatial dimension that offers the significant new perspective of this collection. Published a decade ago, the collection At the Margins. Minority groups in Premodern Italy, edited by Stephen Milner makes an interesting comparison to the present collection.10 It brings together a series of essays, many of which deal with specific social groups that can be identified as being on the margins of society: sodomites, Jews, prostitutes, slaves, mountaineers, and the elderly. In it the margins are constituted to some extent at least by the degree to which groups were defined, excluded, or ignored

Afterword  205 by contemporaries, and have subsequently been overlooked or underdocumented by historians. In his contribution to the collection Peter Burke writes that ‘in some recent historical writing, the Renaissance has been decentered in at least three respects: geographical, thematic, and social’.11 Burke’s comment is framed through a discussion of the postmodern practice of history so that the social sense of decentring is described as ‘more emphasis on the collaboration of small groups’, the geographical as a broadening out of the enquiry from the traditional paradigms of Florence and Italy to wider global concerns, and the thematic as a way to describe the extending of the domains of scholarly interest (e.g., from art history to material culture, from literature to a wider range of performance).12 Following on this view, which is informed by the ‘linguistic turn’, the assembled essays contribute to challenging centre-margin assumptions, illustrating a variety of groups and subjects whose collective identities had been largely overlooked; the focus is on social and textual evidence however, with little discussion of how such factors were expressed visually or spatially in cities. The present collection goes further in its exploration of what constitute the margins of pre-modern Europe, testing these boundaries and continuing to challenge simplistic formulations of centre-periphery that might be implied by the terminology. As the title makes clear, a focus has been placed on considering physical location in relation to the idea of margins, anchoring the discussion to place as well as to social relationships and associations in the city. The terminology of inclusion/exclusion that the definition of margin implies is a primary subject of discussion for many of the authors, who express some unease in relation to how margins might be construed, and how given groups might be determined by deviance from normative behaviours and definitions. The essays in the collection deal with a diverse range of subjects: ­lepers, disabled, single women, foreigners, executioners, slaves, pedlars, prostitutes, and child victims of rape. While a modern reader might understand all these as being marginalized social groups, David Turner points out that some caution must be exercised in eliding modern understandings with the evolving and changing contexts of the past. In discussing the narrative of disability studies he cautions against fixed interpretative frameworks—for example of the Industrial Revolution as a period of disenfranchisement of the disabled as family structures were eroded—and urges scholars to a more nuanced assessment of those contexts within which ‘impairments became visible’. Similar concerns are expressed in Elma Brenner’s discussion of leprosy and mental disorders, and how these were managed in quite different ways in the fifteenth century to preceding periods. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, Sarah Toulalan’s discussion of child rape and sexual assault cases from the eighteenth-century Old Bailey archive reveals the troubling reality that the ‘ruin’ of reputation meant that it was the victims of rape, not their perpetrators, that were marginalized. Sara Butler’s essay, in turn, reveals the degree to which assumptions about marginality might be

206  Fabrizio Nevola misplaced, or at least tell only part of a more complex story. Her account of medieval single women shows that while their unmarried status placed many at the legal and social margins of societies that often elided their condition with that of prostitutes, considerable documentary evidence shows their financial independence and agency. Andrew Spicer’s discussion of William Herbert’s account of the condition of foreigners in England (1662) documents a live debate in England after the Restoration, indicating that though marginal, foreigners and religious refugees might be viewed favourably. Conversely, evidence from the Venetian archives leads Rosa Salzberg to explore how pedlars in the centre of the city might become vulnerable or receptive to heterodox religious beliefs, and become consequently subject to investigation by the Inquisition. All these examples show a nuanced and sensitive approach towards the problems raised by the term ‘margin’, and how it can nevertheless be usefully deployed in our enquiries. What seems to be at stake in many of the essays in the collection is that the margin is defined in relation to established normative behaviours and centres of authority; collectively they highlight an understanding of margins as being a construct, encoded in language or inscribed in actions and behaviours performed in urban space. While terminology, regulation, and legislation are factors that emerge as significant in the definitions of the margins discussed in a number of essays, the spatial dimension emerges as being particularly important and constitutes a unifying theme through much of the collection. Renaissance architectural treatises were vocal from the fifteenth century in promoting cities that would be ordered, stratified, and laid out on symmetrical grids.13 Filarete’s ideal city of Sforzinda, laid out on a radial plan had authority at its centre and social status declining as it radiated out towards the edges; much the same can be said for Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s housing designs that range from centrally located palaces for rulers down to artisan row-housing on the periphery.14 Nevertheless, in all but a few cases—most of these militarized new towns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the ‘ideal city’ rarely corresponded to built reality, and cities remained complex spaces of overlapping communities and groups.15 Even within this heterogeneous and mixed urban ecology, marginal groups might consciously be made to stand out. Specific buildings were frequently associated with foreigners for example, ranging from the monumental foreign trading posts in Venice or the cities of the southern Mediterranean, to the far more humble places of arrival—hostels, pilgrimage hospitals, inns— for the majority of travellers that flowed through the cities of pre-modern Europe.16 Zones and enclaves were reserved for religious minorities, while officially sanctioned streets and buildings were prescribed for dishonourable professions such as prostitutes or executioners.17 Even here however, the margins between ideal and reality are blurred; countless cases from the Italian archives illustrate how permeable the physical and social boundaries of honour were, and the implications of this played out in the city streets.18

Afterword  207 Nevertheless, it is clear that certain liminal sites—to use the term popularized by Victor Turner from Arnold van Gennep—do appear to have attracted the clustering of marginal or excluded elements of society. Begging by lepers and the mentally infirm regularly occurred on city edges around gates, while Carmen Fracchia shows how slave residences in Seville tended to cluster in the poor quarters outside the city walls, where restrictions in movement specifically served to control ‘Jews, Moors, Indians, mulattos and slaves’. Within the city, not all space had the same meaning, and a useful concept that emerges from this collection is that of ‘dishonourbale’ urban space. Joel Harrington documents the remarkable biography of the Nuremberg city executioner Frantz Schmidt, whose profession marked him with a dishonourable reputation; this was expressed physically and spatially through his residence, the ‘Hangman’s House’ that stood on an island on the river Pegnitz adjacent to the pig market, and close to the brothel and prison, connected by ‘Hangman’s Bridge’ to the city. As Jane Stevens Crawshaw shows for the prostitutes of Genoa, this was also the case for districts where municipal brothels and more informal prostitution clustered. Diane Ghirardo’s research on prostitution in Ferrara has shown that a specific topography of prostitution existed in the early modern city; this is also documented in Genoa, where strict controls on prostitutes’ visibility and access to particular areas, as well as an acoustic marker of a ‘brothel bell’, regulated their hours of business.19 As Nicholas Terpstra and others have argued, with the tightening of regulations governing of religious foundations through the sixteenth century, attempts were made to further isolate such dishonourable zones from those where monasteries and convents were situated.20 This moral zoning of the city followed on earlier zoning regulations— predominantly structured around commercial or public health considerations— that were increasingly widespread from the fifteenth century. Here again, how the margins are defined spatially is significant and varies quite widely. In this collection Brenner points to the physical segregation and controls that increasingly limited the movement of leprous bodies within the city during the fifteenth century. As Guy Geltner has proposed, there is some overlap between fifteenth-century regulations controlling the spread of disease, with zoning requirements that are seemingly motivated by aesthetic considerations of urban decorum.21 In line with Geltner’s proposal that evidence from material culture, architecture and urban design can contribute to developing new research questions regarding early modern public health, evidence from various cities, including Siena, points to attempts to remove certain professions, such as butchers that produced noise, smell and waste, from central city streets. Such actions literally pushed undesirable professions to the city’s edges, while at the same time encouraging the clustering of luxury retailers along the city’s main arteries.22 While ‘ornato’ may have been a primary aim for such rulings, the ‘improvement and health of human bodies (sanità deli corpi humani), on account of both the great stink and fetid smells that are apt to promote every illness (morbo) and pestilence’ illustrates the perception

208  Fabrizio Nevola that public health considerations also underpinned urban renewal plans of this sort.23 Bringing the argument full circle, Stevens Crawshaw makes the interesting case that the complex negotiations around the placement of Genoa’s new brothel at Castelletto wove together concerns for moral and physical hygiene, and the negative effects on both honour and health that its new location would have on the surrounding neighbourhood. Putting place and space into a discussion about the margins helps provide geographical coordinates and physical expression to otherwise potentially evanescent or subjective notions of social belonging and exclusion. It does not necessarily simplify matters however; as the essays collected here repeatedly show, the blurring of centre-periphery distinctions remains a central observation for many of the studies. Salzberg astutely reminds us that in Venice, mobile and marginal groups of pedlars, whose thin networks of trust made them dependent on individual shopkeeper-patrons around the commercial hub at Rialto, challenge our perceptions of margin, and reveal that the ‘social geography of the early modern city was much more complex than the simple division of centre and margins’. What emerges from such observations however—and there are of course numerous examples of the complex interwoven character of the social and spatial margins in this collection—is a more interesting and multi-layered understanding of the city as it was experienced and physically constituted in the pre-modern period.

Notes 1 ASS, Concistoro 2155, fol. 5 14 April 1464: ‘in decto pozzo che è dinanzi a una casa del eximio doctore dell’arti et di medicina maestro Bartolo di Tura cittadino di Siena’. 2 Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution in Renaissance Ferrara’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60 (2001), 402–31, 405; Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 17–18. 3 Giovanni Prunai, Bartalo di Tura in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, V (Rome, 1963), pp. 706–07; Antonia Whitley, ‘Mind over Matter. Living with Ill Health: the case of Pius II’ in Fabrizio Nevola (ed.), Pio II Piccolomini: Il papa del rinascimento a Siena, Acts of the International Conference, Siena, 5–7 May 2005 (Siena, 2009), pp. 269–79; Didier Boisseuil, ‘Pie II et les bains siennois’ in Nevola (ed.), Pio II Piccolomini, pp. 109–27. 4 For a discussion of the area see Fabrizio Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City (New Haven and London, 2007), pp. 116–28. For a playful discussion of the incident see Maria Assunta Ceppari, ‘L’Arogon’ in M.A. Ceppari Ridolfi, E. Jacona and P. Turrini (eds), Schiave, ribaldi e signori a Siena nel Rinascimento (Siena, 1994), pp. 127–36. On Bartalo’s house see Petra Pertici, La città magnificata: interventi edilizi a Siena nel Quattrocento (Siena, 1995), p. 48. For a brief discussion of prostitution in Siena see Fabrizio Nevola, ‘ “Più honorati et suntuosi ala Republica”: Botteghe and Luxury Retail Along Siena’s Strada Romana’ in B. Blondé, P. Stabel, J. Stobbart and I. Van Damme (eds), Buyers and Sellers: Retail Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 65–78. 5 Ceppari, ‘L’Arogon’, 129 with documents for this incident.

Afterword  209 6 For the fourteenth century legislation see M. S. Elsheikh (ed.), Il Costituto del comune di Siena volgarizzato nel MCCCIX–MCCCX (Città di Castello, 2002); Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, pp. 22–4. See also F. Bargagli Petrucci, Le fonti di Siena e il loro acquedotti. Note dalle origini al MDLV (Siena and Florence, 1903 and 1906; reprinted Siena, 1992). 7 Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, p. 125. 8 Comments that follow are discussed further with extensive bibliography in Fabrizio Nevola and David Rosenthal, ‘Urban Communities in Early Modern Europe (c. 1400–1700): A  Research Review’, last modified November  2011, available for download at www.earlymoderncommunities.org/ and Fabrizio Nevola, ‘Introduction: Locating Communities in the Early Modern Italian City’, special issue of Urban History 37:3 (2010), 349–59. 9 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles, 1984). The application of such spatial analysis to our understanding of streets is the subject of Fabrizio Nevola, ‘Review Essay: Street Life in Early Modern Europe’, Renaissance Quarterly 66 (2013), 1332–45. 10 Stephen Milner (ed.), At the Margins. Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (Minneapolis MN and London, 2005). 11 Peter Burke, ‘Decentering the Italian Renaissance: The Challenge of Postmodernism’ in Milner (ed.), At the Margins, pp. 36–50, 46. 12 Burke, ‘Decentering’, p. 46; the view is one that is shaped in relation to the ‘linguistic turn’ explored in Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004). 13 James Ackerman and Myra N. Rosenfeld, ‘Social Stratification in Renaissance Urban Planning’ in Susan Zimerman and Ronald Weissman (eds), Urban Life in the Renaissance (Newark, 1989), pp. 21–49. 14 See most recently the comments by Christy Anderson, Renaissance Architecture (Oxford, 2013), pp. 141–75. 15 For planned military ideal cities, see Martha D. Pollak, Cities at War in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2010). 16 Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World (Cambridge, 2009); Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty (eds), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2002). 17 Donatella Calabi, Ennio Concina and Ugo Camerino, La città degli Ebrei. Il Ghetto di Venezia: architettura ed urbanistica (Venice, 1991). 18 For example on Rome, Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago IL and London, 2004) and Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘To Pray, to Work, to Hear, to Speak: Women in Roman Streets c.1600’, Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008), 289–311. 19 Ghirardo, ‘The Topography of Prostitution’; Kevin Mummey and Kathryn Reyerson ‘Whose City Is This? Hucksters, Domestic Servants, Wet-Nurses, Prostitutes and Slaves in Late Medieval Western Mediterranean Urban Society’, History Compass 9 (2011), 910–22. 20 Nicholas Terpstra, Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore MD, 2010). See also Sharon T. Strocchia and Nicholas Terpstra, ‘There are Always Cracks in the Wall,’ Interview by David Rosenthal and Fabrizio Nevola, 2011, http://earlymoderncommunities.org/home/interviews-2/ sharon-strocchia-and-nicholas-terpstra-there-are-always-cracks-in-the-wall/ 21 Guy Geltner, ‘Public Health and the Pre-Modern City: A Research Agenda’, History Compass 10 (2012), 231–45. 22 Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City, pp. 97–8; Nevola, ‘ “Più honorati” ’; Mark Jenner, ‘Airs, Waters, Places 1500–1800’ in P. Elmer (ed.), The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1500–1800 (Manchester,

210  Fabrizio Nevola 2004), pp. 284–86; Joe Wheeler, ‘Stench in Sixteenth-Century Venice’ in Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward (eds), The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500 (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 25–38. 23 ASS, Concistoro 2118 f. 186 (24 August 1463) repeated in ASS, Statuto 25, ff. 330v–31. More broadly see R. Mucciarelli, ‘Igiene, salute e pubblico decoro nel Medioevo’ in Vergognosa Immunditia: Igiene pubblica e privata a Siena dal medioevo all’età contemporanea (Siena, 2000), pp. 13–84.

Contributors

Elma Brenner is Specialist in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine, Wellcome Library, London. Sara M. Butler is Gregory F. Curtin, S. J., Distinguished Professor of History at Loyola University, New Orleans. Carmen Fracchia is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Spanish Visual Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Joel F. Harrington is Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University Fabrizio Nevola is Professor in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. Rosa M. Salzberg is Assistant Professor of Italian Renaissance History, University of Warwick. Andrew Spicer is Professor of Early Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University and a Literary Director of the Royal Historical Society. Jane L. Stevens Crawshaw is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in History at Oxford Brookes University. Sarah Toulalan is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter. David M. Turner is Professor of History at the University of Swansea.

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Index

alcohol 124, 150n42, 190 aliens see foreigners apprenticeships 47, 59, 88, 108, 139, 182 architecture 207; access to 39; closed nature of 6; conversion of 8, 155 – 6, 165, 166 art 1, 18n72, 117, 126 – 30 beggars 9, 52, 138, 145; and disability 40, 44 – 5, 50; and honour 104 – 5; language of 11, 53, 135; legislation 45 – 7; visibility of 44, 136 – 7; see also lepers and begging bells 6, 159 – 60 blackness 10, 11, 117, 119 – 29; see also skin blasphemy 161, 163 Blok, A. 1, 11 the body: branding of 10, congenital disabilities of 49; debilitating injuries to 50, 51; dishonourable work with 104, 107; image of 103, 172; violence and infection and 181, 186, 190, 193, 195 Bourdieu, P. 106, 108, 109, 114 brothels as communities 5, 11; access to 9, 158 – 60; architectural conversion of 8, 155, 164 – 6, 171; location of 5 – 6, 113, 156 – 8, 204, 207; regulation of 62, 157 – 8; burial 122, 123, 166 – 7; butcheries 26 – 7, 207; see also slaughterhouses Carpaccio, V. 1 – 3 Catholic Reformation, the 87, 117, 119, 124 – 5, 170, 172 – 3 cemeteries 161 charity: alms giving 23; givers of 51 – 2, 93; institutions of 3, 21, 123, 170;

networks of 5 – 6, 146; religious teaching regarding 144 Charles II 86 Charles V 107, 127 chastity see honour children: charity and 143; disabilities and 41, 42, 43, 49, 50; in the streets 6, 8, 155; and sexual reputation 187; status and definitions of 63 86, 91, 107, 109 – 12, 121, 181 – 3; violence against 188 – 95 Christianity: baptism 107, 119, 124, 126, 129; Biblical teaching 22 – 5, 31, 42, 82 – 4, 124 – 9, 169; churches 3, 8, 22, 144 – 5, 161, 165 – 70; foreign churches 81 – 93; healing shrines 24 – 5; and ideas of imprisonment 24; religious connotations of water 129, 169; sacred space 47, 107, 161 city gates 8, 23, 121, 158 – 9, 171, 207 cleanliness and dirt: and disease spread 26; urban and environmental 8, 45, 137, 155 – 7, 159, 168 – 9; and sin 129, 168 – 9, 171 – 3; and work 103 – 4, 107, 122; see also Douglas, M. clothing 9 – 10, 29, 66, 105, 143, 159 – 60 communities: charity within 25, 52; confinement within 48, 160; definitions of 3 – 6, 11, 206; and migration 83, 90, 93, 141; and reputation 104, 181 – 4, 192 confraternities 3, 5, 122 – 5 conversion 3, 7 – 8, 11, 119, 126, 170 Counter Reformation see Catholic Reformation credit 64 – 71,  183 court culture 127 – 9 Cromwell, O. 79, 89

214 Index denunciations 138, 141, 158, 160, 161 de Pareja, J. 117 – 8, 125 – 30 deviance 3, 15n16, 32, 193 disability 122, 138: and confinement 48; definitions of 30, 39 – 43, and industrialisation 41 – 2; and poverty 44 – 6; and veterans 46; see also mental disorders disease 9, 12, 26 – 7, 144, 156, 207; see also leprosy; plague; venereal disease Douglas, M. 6, 172 Duncan, D. 6, 13 dwarfs 127 Edward III 32 – 3 Edward VI 85, 93 Elizabeth I 81, 83, 85, 86, 88 Elizabethan Poor Law 41, 45, 47, 52 – 3 England: foreign churches in 85 – 7, 93; Myddle, Shropshire 40, 47, 49 – 53; Norwich 88, 91; Southampton 88; see also London executioners 5, 11, 104 – 14, 122, 207 families: charity and care 25 – 6, 46 – 52, 143; foreigners 5, 10, 80 – 94, 103; and reputation 67, 105, 107 – 12, 167, 183 – 7,  192 foreign churches see Christianity: foreign churches foreign merchants 5 – 7, 10, 80, 88, 92 Foucault, M. 48 France 22, 112, 146, 150n43; Normandy 22 – 34 French Disease see venereal disease gardens 52, 155, 164, 203 Genoa: brothel 158 – 60; Castelletto 165 – 6; San Francesco di Castelletto 156, 158, 165, 166 – 71; San Lorenzo 155, 158; Santa Maria Maddalena 161; strada nuova 155, 163 – 5, 171 Germany 104 – 5, 143; Bamberg 106, 109; Nuremberg 106 – 13; see also Weiditz, C. Ghetto 5 – 6, 8, 11, 113; see also Jews Gleeson, B. 40, 42 – 4 Gough, R. 40, 47 – 53 guilds 61, 106 – 7, 113, 122, 138 – 40 Gypsies 4, 9, 104, 107, 121, 138 Herbert, W. 80 – 1, 95n12 heresy 9, 136, 138, 142, 145 – 6 home, the: depictions of 1 – 3; and honour 107, 113, 160 – 1, 167; as

locus of charity or care 25, 41 – 2, 48, 170; women and 63 – 4, 121 honour 9, 103 – 5; and chastity 183, 191 – 2,  195 hospitals 24 – 5, 120, 122 – 3, 124,  158 inns see taverns Inquisition 4, 5, 119, 136, 145 Jesuits 3, 119 jewellery 70, 105, 121, 163 Jews: accusations against 26, 79; ambiguous position of 6 – 8, 83 – 5; conversions of 7, 119, 129; distinguishing signs for 9, 105; expulsion of 4; see also Ghetto jurisdictions 6; see also law language 10 – 12, 30 – 3, 45 – 6, 59 – 61, 85 – 6, 141 – 2, 187; see also blasphemy law 4, 59 – 61, 81 – 3, 105 – 7, 182 – 3, 191 – 2; Carolina 108 leper houses 21 – 3, 107, 121 lepers and begging 23, 27, 31, 33 leprosy 5, 21, 25, 26, 30 – 3 Locke, J. 85 London 5, 24 – 5, 44 – 5, 63 – 73, 79 – 81, 91 – 2; Court of Chancery 61; Court of Common Pleas (Common Bench) 61, 68, 71, 73; Court of Exchequer Chamber 59; Old Bailey 183 – 4 marginality: ambiguity of 3 – 12, 48, 104, 121, 155, 169; and appearance 10; concept of waste 7; and confinement 21; cyclical nature of 1, 156; definitions of 1; and ‘family resemblances’ 2; and historiographical case studies 6 – 8; imagery of 10, 42 – 3; and isolation 47 – 8; medical ‘cures’ for 45, 48; and poverty 4, 39, 43, 44 – 5; print representations of 42 – 3; and sin 24, 32, 42, 49, 124; and space 5 – 6, 10; temporary nature of 1, 39; value in 8 marketplaces 113, 135, 140, 159 – 60, 174n4 maps 10 mental disorders 21 – 34, 49, 121 migration 50, 80 – 5, 90 – 3, 104, 137, 186 music 9, 24, 44, 104, 123 Muslims 3, 9, 119, 129

Index  215 naturalization 80 – 1, 91 – 3; Normandy 22 occupations 3, 45 – 7, 104, 121 – 2, 156, 183; the ‘Other’ 4 pedlars 137 – 8 petitions 46, 61, 79 – 88, 106 – 12, 164 – 71 plague 27, 110, 144, 147 ports 120, 121, 137, 155, 157, 160 poverty 4, 5, 27, 105, 143; see also beggars prisons 21 – 5, 113, 137, 193, 203 processions 5, 27, 123 prostitutes 3, 5, 62, 121, 155 – 62, 191, 203; distinguishing signs for 105 public health 26 – 7, 172, 207 – 8 Protestantism 9, 81 – 2, 138, 142 – 7; see also Reformation rape 181 – 2 Reformation, the 42, 87 religious coexistence 81 religious orders 11, 23 – 4, 119 – 20, 166 – 70,  207 religious toleration 85 Renaissance, the 7, 10, 155, 173 – 4n2, 205 – 6 rented properties 145, 161 Restoration, the 80, 187 ritual 6 Rubens, P.P. 127 ruination 186 – 7 rural settings 10, 23 – 4, 49, 138 saints 29, 37n51, 84, 130, 161; St Antony Abbot 123; St Benedict of Palermo 123, 125; St Caterina Fieschi Adorno 170; St Ildefonso 124; St Iphigenia 124, 125; St James 125; St Matthew 128; St Philip 129 Schmidt, F. 106 – 11 seasons 8, 172

self-fashioning 7, 104 servants 62, 66 – 7, 120 – 1, 162, 182, 192 sexual crime 121, 181 – 95 skin 10, 103, 119, 129 – 30, 194 slaughterhouses 107, 121, 158 slavery 12, 118 – 30, 162 social mobility 103 – 14 space 5 – 9, 120 – 2, 144 – 7, 156 – 7, 204 – 8 Spain 7, 10, 118 – 9, 120 – 4, 143 streets 104, 155 – 9, 164, 171, 206: cleanliness of 44, 137; safety of 8, 182; temporary changes to 8 – 9; see also public health taverns 105, 107, 122, 136, 142, 165 travel 7 – 10, 23, 83, 142 – 3, 160, 206 trials (see law); trades (see occupations) vagrancy 4, 10; see also beggars Velázquez, D. 117 – 18, 125 – 9 venereal disease 170, 181, 186 – 9, 191 – 4 Venice 7 – 10, 135 – 8, 142, 177n77, 207; Rialto Bridge 135 – 40, 143 Vernazza E. 170 violence 21 – 8, 107, 119, 162 warfare 39, 51, 81 – 6, 108, 119 – 20, 127; Hundred Years War 22, 32 – 3 water supply 26, 121, 126, 157, 169, 203 – 4 weapons 6, 121 – 2, 162 – 3 Weiditz, C. 126 witchcraft 2, 10 women 139, 162; Courtesans 1 – 2, 13; nuns 4, 6, 24, 169; pregnant 29 – 30, 191; shaming insults for 105, 163; single women 59 – 61; slaves 121, 122, 162; widows 25, 29, 31, 60, 62, 122, 140; see also prostitutes Zemon Davis, N. 7, 11